Reading Strategies for Students with Mild Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boyle, Joseph R.

2008-01-01

Teaching children with mild disabilities to read can be a challenging task for even the most seasoned teacher. In order to be successful, teachers need to be knowledgeable about the big five of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000). While the ultimate goal of reading is…

Reading Research at Work: Foundations of Effective Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stahl, Katherine A. Dougherty, Ed.; McKenna, Michael C., Ed.

2006-01-01

This book presents state-of-the-science research on the components of successful literacy learning and how to target them in contemporary classrooms. The volume builds on and extends the work of Steven Stahl, whose pioneering contributions encompassed the key areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and assessment.…

Herman Method[TM]. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2010

2010-01-01

The "Herman Method"[TM] teaches reading in small groups of up to three students. The curriculum provides instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, while also teaching spelling and writing. It contains 20 modules of instruction through a fifth grade level. Each module includes a reading,…

Tile Test: A Hands-On Approach for Assessing Phonics in the Early Grades

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Norman, Kimberly A.; Calfee, Robert C.

2004-01-01

An instrument for assessing young students' understanding of the English orthographic system is presented. The Tile Test measures understanding of phoneme awareness, letter-sound correspondences, decoding and spelling of words, sight-word reading, and the application of decoding and spelling in sentences. Metalinguistic questions embedded within…

Achieving Literacy Excellence through Identifying and Utilizing High Yield Strategies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hardison, Ashley

2017-01-01

The purpose of this study was to delve into the literacy instructional strategies of selected high-performing K-2 teachers in a Clark County, Nevada school district. The study assessed the efficacy of teachers using five core literacy components: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension for student achievement. High…

Disciplinary knowledge of K-3 teachers and their knowledge calibration in the domain of early literacy.

PubMed

Cunningham, Anne E; Perry, Kathryn E; Stanovich, Keith E; Stanovich, Paula J

2004-06-01

Recently, investigators have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of teachers' domain specific knowledge in the area of reading, and its implications for both classroom practice and student learning. The aims of the present study were to assess kindergarten to third-grade teachers' actual and perceived reading-related subject matter knowledge, and to investigate the extent to which teachers calibrate their reading related subject matter knowledge by examining relationships between actual and perceived knowledge. Results indicated that while teachers demonstrated limited knowledge of children's literature, phoneme awareness, and phonics, the majority of these same teachers evaluated their knowledge levels quite positively. Teachers demonstrated some ability to calibrate their own knowledge levels in the area of children's literature, yet they were poorly calibrated in the domains of phoneme awareness and phonics. These findings suggest that teachers tend to overestimate their reading related subject matter knowledge and are often unaware of what they know and do not know. Implications for the design of teacher education at both the preservice and inservice levels are discussed.

The "wh" questions of visual phonics: what, who, where, when, and why.

PubMed

Narr, Rachel F; Cawthon, Stephanie W

2011-01-01

Visual Phonics is a reading instructional tool that has been implemented in isolated classrooms for over 20 years. In the past 5 years, several experimental studies demonstrated its efficacy with students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Through a national survey with 200 participants, this study specifically addresses who, where, how, and why a sample of teachers use Visual Phonics in their everyday reading instruction. Through checklists of teaching practice, rating scales, and open-ended questions, teachers self-reported their use of Visual Phonics, reflected upon its efficacy, and what they think about using it with students with a diverse set of instructional needs. The majority reported that Visual Phonics was easy to use, engaging to students, and easy to integrate into a structured reading curriculum. The majority of respondents agreed that it helps increase phonemic awareness and decoding skills, build vocabulary, as well as increase reading comprehension. The implications of these findings in bridging the research-to-practice gap are discussed.

Scientifically-Based Reading Research: A Primer for Adult and Family Literacy Educators. Research to Practice.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Padak, Nancy; Rasinski, Tim; Mraz, Maryann

The National Reading Panel (NRP) reviewed quantitative reading research focusing on grades K-3 to identify methods leading to reading success. The following areas were identified as key areas in the process of beginning to read: (1) phonemic awareness; (2) phonics; (3) fluency; (4) vocabulary; and (5) comprehension. The research findings were…

Early Intervention in Reading[R]. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2008

2008-01-01

"Early Intervention in Reading"[R] is a program designed to provide extra instruction to groups of students at risk of failing to learn to read. The program uses picture books to stress instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, and contextual analysis, along with repeated reading and writing. In grades K, 1, and 2, the program is based on…

Open Court Reading©. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report. Updated October 2014

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2014

2014-01-01

"Open Court Reading©" is a reading program for grades K-6 published by McGraw-Hill Education that is designed to teach decoding, comprehension, inquiry, and writing in a three-part logical progression. Part One of each unit, Preparing to Read, focuses on phonemic awareness, sounds and letters, phonics, fluency, and word knowledge. Part…

Open Court Reading[c]. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2012

2012-01-01

"Open Court Reading"[c] is a core reading program for grades K-6 developed by SRA/McGraw-Hill that is designed to teach decoding, comprehension, inquiry, and writing in a logical progression. Part 1 of each unit, Preparing to Read, focuses on phonemic awareness, sounds and letters, phonics, fluency, and word knowledge. Part 2, Reading…

Open Court Reading[c]. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2008

2008-01-01

"Open Court Reading"[c] is an elementary basal reading program for grades K-6 developed by SRA/McGraw-Hill. The program is designed to systematically teach decoding, comprehension, inquiry and investigation, and writing in a logical progression. Part 1 of each unit, Preparing to Read, focuses on phonemic awareness, sounds and letters, phonics,…

Creating Strategic Readers: Techniques for Developing Competency in Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ellery, Valerie

2004-01-01

This comprehensive resource can be used by teachers to align instruction with current standards and to give students the best possible foundation for reading achievement. Organized around the five essential components of reading instruction identified in the report of the U.S. National Reading Panel, this book: (1) Lays the groundwork for creating…

Impact of Attending Jump Start Literacy Camp on Reading Achievement among Third and Fourth Grade Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Padgett, Carrie B.

2010-01-01

The Jump Start Literacy Camp was developed as a means to combat summer learning loss. The camp utilized high-energy activities to target phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. This study examined the effects of the Jump Start Literacy Camp on reading achievement for rising third and fourth grade students in an urban…

My Virtual Reading Coach: "An Analysis of Usage and Impact," 2013-14. Technical Note. Volume 3, Number 2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Urdegar, Steven M.

2014-01-01

My Virtual Reading Coach (MVRC) is an online program for students who have been identified as struggling readers. It is used as an intervention within the Response to Intervention (RtI) framework, as well as for students with disabilities. The software addresses reading sub-skills (i.e., comprehension, fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics, and…

The Relationships between Leadership Practice and Teacher Motivation, Capacity, and Work Setting as Related to Change in Literacy Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baker, Linda Marie

2011-01-01

Recent studies have indicated the necessity for changes in literacy assessment and instruction. Well respected authorities have agreed that direct, explicit, and systematic instruction in the five basic components of reading (i.e., phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) is essential to ensure that all students have an…

RAN as a predictor of reading skills, and vice versa: results from a randomised reading intervention.

PubMed

Wolff, Ulrika

2014-07-01

Although phonemic awareness is a well-known factor predicting early reading development, there is also evidence that Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is an independent factor that contributes to early reading. The aim of this study is to examine phonemic awareness and RAN as predictors of reading speed, reading comprehension and spelling for children with reading difficulties. It also investigates a possible reciprocal relationship between RAN and reading skills, and the possibility of enhancing RAN by intervention. These issues are addressed by examining longitudinal data from a randomised reading intervention study carried out in Sweden for 9-year-old children with reading difficulties (N = 112). The intervention comprised three main elements: training of phonics, reading comprehension strategies and reading speed. The analysis of the data was carried out using structural equation modelling. The results demonstrated that after controlling for autoregressive effects and non-verbal IQ, RAN predicts reading speed whereas phonemic awareness predicts reading comprehension and spelling. RAN was significantly enhanced by training and a reciprocal relationship between reading speed and RAN was found. These findings contribute to support the view that both phonemic awareness and RAN independently influence early phases of reading, and that both are possible to enhance by training.

A Study of the Teacher's Professional Development in Identification of First Grade Students' Phases of Word Learning and Its Effect on Instructional Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Humbert, Mary Beth C.

2017-01-01

Beginning readers and struggling readers need explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics (Adams, 2008; Ehri,1992, 1998; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, & Yaghoub-Zadeh, 2001; Gaskins et al., 1997; Moats, 2004; Morris, 2015; National Reading Panel, 2000; Reutzel, 2015). Ehri and McCormick's (2008) phases of word learning…

A Meta-Analysis of the Long-Term Effects of Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension Interventions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suggate, Sebastian P.

2016-01-01

Much is known about short-term--but very little about the long-term--effects of reading interventions. To rectify this, a detailed analysis of follow-up effects as a function of intervention, sample, and methodological variables was conducted. A total of 71 intervention-control groups were selected (N = 8,161 at posttest) from studies reporting…

Synthetic phonics and decodable instructional reading texts: How far do these support poor readers?

PubMed

Price-Mohr, Ruth Maria; Price, Colin Bernard

2018-05-01

This paper presents data from a quasi-experimental trial with paired randomisation that emerged during the development of a reading scheme for children in England. This trial was conducted with a group of 12 children, aged 5-6, and considered to be falling behind their peers in reading ability and a matched control group. There were two intervention conditions (A: using mixed teaching methods and a high percentage of non-phonically decodable vocabulary; P: using mixed teaching methods and low percentage of non-decodable vocabulary); allocation to these was randomised. Children were assessed at pre- and post-test on standardised measures of receptive vocabulary, phoneme awareness, word reading, and comprehension. Two class teachers in the same school each selected 6 children, who they considered to be poor readers, to participate (n = 12). A control group (using synthetic phonics only and phonically decodable vocabulary) was selected from the same 2 classes based on pre-test scores for word reading (n = 16). Results from the study show positive benefits for poor readers from using both additional teaching methods (such as analytic phonics, sight word vocabulary, and oral vocabulary extension) in addition to synthetic phonics, and also non-decodable vocabulary in instructional reading text. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Efficacy of Phonics-Based Instruction of English as a Second Language in an Italian High School: A Randomised Controlled Trial

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coates, Robert Alexander Graham; Gorham, Judith; Nicholas, Richard

2017-01-01

Recent neurological breakthroughs in our understanding of the Critical Period Hypothesis and prosody may suggest strategies on how phonics instruction could improve L2 language learning and in particular phoneme/grapheme decoding. We therefore conducted a randomised controlled-trial on the application of prosody and phonics techniques, to improve…

Teachers' literacy-related knowledge and self-perceptions in relation to preparation and experience.

PubMed

Spear-Swerling, Louise; Brucker, Pamela Owen; Alfano, Michael P

2005-12-01

After rating their own literacy-related knowledge in three areas (knowledge about reading/reading development, phonemic awareness/phonics, and morpheme awareness/structural analysis), graduate teacher-education students completed five tasks intended to measure their actual disciplinary knowledge in these areas. Teachers with high levels of prior background (i.e., course preparation and experience) rated themselves as significantly more knowledgeable than did low-background teachers in all areas; high-background participants also significantly outperformed low-background participants on all tasks. However, even high-background teachers scored well below ceiling on the tasks. Regression analyses indicated that teachers' self-perceptions and knowledge were positively influenced by both level of preparation and teaching experience, although the influences on teachers' knowledge differed by task. Teachers had some accurate perceptions of their own knowledge, especially in the area of phonics. Results suggest that differentiating levels of preparation may be useful in studying teacher knowledge, and also support the notion of a substantial gap between research on reading and teacher preparation in reading.

The effect of phonics-enhanced Big Book reading on the language and literacy skills of 6-year-old pupils of different reading ability attending lower SES schools.

PubMed

Tse, Laura; Nicholson, Tom

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study was to improve the literacy achievement of lower socioeconomic status (SES) children by combining explicit phonics with Big Book reading. Big Book reading is a component of the text-centered (or book reading) approach used in New Zealand schools. It involves the teacher in reading an enlarged book to children and demonstrating how to use semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic cues to learn to read. There has been little research, however, to find out whether the effectiveness of Big Book reading is enhanced by adding explicit phonics. In this study, a group of 96 second graders from three lower SES primary schools in New Zealand were taught in 24 small groups of four, tracked into three different reading ability levels. All pupils were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: a control group who received math instruction, Big Book reading enhanced with phonics (BB/EP), Big Book reading on its own, and Phonics on its own. The results showed that the BB/EP group made significantly better progress than the Big Book and Phonics groups in word reading, reading comprehension, spelling, and phonemic awareness. In reading accuracy, the BB/EP and Big Book groups scored similarly. In basic decoding skills the BB/EP and Phonics groups scored similarly. The combined instruction, compared with Big Book reading and phonics, appeared to have no comparative disadvantages and considerable advantages. The present findings could be a model for New Zealand and other countries in their efforts to increase the literacy achievement of disadvantaged pupils.

The effect of phonics-enhanced Big Book reading on the language and literacy skills of 6-year-old pupils of different reading ability attending lower SES schools

PubMed Central

Tse, Laura; Nicholson, Tom

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study was to improve the literacy achievement of lower socioeconomic status (SES) children by combining explicit phonics with Big Book reading. Big Book reading is a component of the text-centered (or book reading) approach used in New Zealand schools. It involves the teacher in reading an enlarged book to children and demonstrating how to use semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic cues to learn to read. There has been little research, however, to find out whether the effectiveness of Big Book reading is enhanced by adding explicit phonics. In this study, a group of 96 second graders from three lower SES primary schools in New Zealand were taught in 24 small groups of four, tracked into three different reading ability levels. All pupils were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: a control group who received math instruction, Big Book reading enhanced with phonics (BB/EP), Big Book reading on its own, and Phonics on its own. The results showed that the BB/EP group made significantly better progress than the Big Book and Phonics groups in word reading, reading comprehension, spelling, and phonemic awareness. In reading accuracy, the BB/EP and Big Book groups scored similarly. In basic decoding skills the BB/EP and Phonics groups scored similarly. The combined instruction, compared with Big Book reading and phonics, appeared to have no comparative disadvantages and considerable advantages. The present findings could be a model for New Zealand and other countries in their efforts to increase the literacy achievement of disadvantaged pupils. PMID:25431560

Emergent Literacy in Thai Preschoolers: A Preliminary Study.

PubMed

Yampratoom, Ramorn; Aroonyadech, Nawarat; Ruangdaraganon, Nichara; Roongpraiwan, Rawiwan; Kositprapa, Jariya

To investigate emergent literacy skills, including phonological awareness when presented with an initial phoneme-matching task and letter knowledge when presented with a letter-naming task in Thai preschoolers, and to identify key factors associated with those skills. Four hundred twelve typically developing children in their final kindergarten year were enrolled in this study. Their emergent reading skills were measured by initial phoneme-matching and letter-naming tasks. Determinant variables, such as parents' education and teachers' perception, were collected by self-report questionnaires. The mean score of the initial phoneme-matching task was 4.5 (45% of a total of 10 scores). The mean score of the letter-naming task without a picture representing the target letter name was 30.2 (68.6% of a total of 44 scores), which increased to 38.8 (88.2% of a total of 44 scores) in the letter-naming task when a picture representing the target letter name was provided. Both initial phoneme-matching and letter-naming abilities were associated with the mother's education and household income. Letter-naming ability was also influenced by home reading activities and gender. This was a preliminary study into emergent literacy skills of Thai preschoolers. The findings supported the importance of focusing on phonological awareness and phonics, especially in the socioeconomic disadvantaged group.

Inquiry about Learning To Read.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Albert, Elaine

Some researchers believe that phonics is the more natural way to teach reading because, instead of requiring the learner to memorize whole words, phonics shows the learner the process by which alphabetic writing is converted into speech. The human baby babbles more than enough phonemes for any language. Before there was an alphabet, humans drew…

GRAPHEME-PHONEME REGULARITY AND ITS EFFECTS ON EARLY READING--A PILOT STUDY.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

FRANKENSTEIN, ROSELYN; KJELDERGAARD, PAUL M.

A PILOT EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED TO TEST THE EFFECT OF A SPECIALLY DEVISED PHONIC APPROACH TO EARLY READING IS DESCRIBED. THE PHONIC METHOD USED ACHIEVED SOUND-SYMBOL REGULARITY AND HAD THE FOLLOWING CHARACTERISTICS--(1) CONSONANT GRAPHEMES EACH REPRESENTED ONLY ONE SOUND AND WERE PRINTED USING NEARLY STANDARD ALPHABETIC SYMBOLS. (2) EACH VOWEL…

Pinyin Invented Spelling in Mandarin Chinese-Speaking Children With and Without Reading Difficulties.

PubMed

Ding, Yi; Liu, Ru-De; McBride, Catherine; Zhang, Dake

2015-01-01

This study examined analytical pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching pronunciation and lexical tones of Chinese characters) skills in 54 Mandarin-speaking fourth graders by using an invented spelling instrument that tapped into syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, lexical tones, and tone sandhi in Chinese. Pinyin invented spelling was significantly correlated with Chinese character recognition and Chinese phonological awareness (i.e., syllable deletion and phoneme deletion). In comparison to good and average readers, poor readers performed significantly worse on the invented spelling task, and a difference was also found between average and good readers. To differentiate readers at different levels, the pinyin invented spelling task, which examined both segmental and suprasegmental elements, was superior to the typical phonological awareness task, which examined segments only. Within this new task, items involving tone sandhi (Chinese language changes in which the tones of words alter according to predetermined rules) were more difficult to manipulate than were those without tone sandhi. The findings suggest that this newly developed task may be optimal for tapping unique phonological and linguistic features in reading of Chinese and examining particular tonal difficulties in struggling Chinese readers. In addition, the results suggest that phonics manipulations within tasks of phonological and tonal awareness can alter their difficulty levels. © Hammill Institute on Disabilities 2014.

Word Decoding Development in Incremental Phonics Instruction in a Transparent Orthography

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaars, Moniek M.; Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

2017-01-01

The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the development of word decoding skills during incremental phonics instruction in Dutch as a transparent orthography. A representative sample of 973 Dutch children in the first grade (M[subscript age] = 6;1, SD = 0;5) was exposed to incremental subsets of Dutch grapheme-phoneme correspondences…

Beyond Phonics: The Case for Teaching Children the Logic of the English Spelling System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bowers, Jeffrey S.; Bowers, Peter N.

2017-01-01

A large body of research supports the conclusion that early reading instruction in English should emphasize phonics, that is, the teaching of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. By contrast, we argue that instruction should be designed to make sense of spellings by teaching children that spellings are organized around the interrelation of…

An Index of Phonic Patterns by Vowel Types. AVKO "Great Idea" Reprint Series No. 622.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCabe, Don

Intended for the use of teachers or diagnosticians, this booklet presents charts that list various phonic patterns, word families, or "rimes" associated with specific vowel patterns. Lists in the booklet are arranged according to the 14 basic vowel phonemes in English (including long a, long e, long i, long aw, short ah, and short u).…

Effects of Multisensory Speech Training and Visual Phonics on Speech Production of a Hearing-Impaired Child.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zaccagnini, Cindy M.; Antia, Shirin D.

1993-01-01

This study of the effects of intensive multisensory speech training on the speech production of a profoundly hearing-impaired child (age nine) found that the addition of Visual Phonics hand cues did not result in speech production gains. All six target phonemes were generalized to new words and maintained after the intervention was discontinued.…

Professional development in scientifically based reading instruction: teacher knowledge and reading outcomes.

PubMed

Podhajski, Blanche; Mather, Nancy; Nathan, Jane; Sammons, Janice

2009-01-01

This article reviews the literature and presents data from a study that examined the effects of professional development in scientifically based reading instruction on teacher knowledge and student reading outcomes. The experimental group consisted of four first- and second-grade teachers and their students (n = 33). Three control teachers and their students (n = 14), from a community of significantly higher socioeconomic demographics, were also followed. Experimental teachers participated in a 35-hour course on instruction of phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency and were coached by professional mentors for a year. Although teacher knowledge in the experimental group was initially lower than that of the controls, their scores surpassed the controls on the posttest. First-grade experimental students' growth exceeded the controls in letter name fluency, phonemic segmentation, nonsense word fluency, and oral reading. Second-grade experimental students exceeded controls in phonemic segmentation. Although the teacher sample was small, findings suggest that teachers can improve their knowledge concerning explicit reading instruction and that this new knowledge may contribute to student growth in reading.

What Could Replace the Phonics Screening Check during the Early Years of Reading Development?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Glazzard, Jonathan

2017-01-01

This article argues that the phonics screening check, introduced in England in 2012, is not fit for purpose. It is a test of children's ability to decode words rather than an assessment of their reading skills. Whilst this assessment may, to some extent, support the needs of children who rely on phonemic decoding as a route to word recognition, it…

Responsiveness to Intervention in Children with Dyslexia.

PubMed

Tilanus, Elisabeth A T; Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

2016-08-01

We examined the responsiveness to a 12-week phonics intervention in 54 s-grade Dutch children with dyslexia, and compared their reading and spelling gains to a control group of 61 typical readers. The intervention aimed to train grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), and word reading and spelling by using phonics instruction. We examined the accuracy and efficiency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, decoding words and pseudowords, as well as the accuracy of spelling words before and after the intervention. Moreover, responsiveness to intervention was examined by studying to what extent scores at posttest could directly or indirectly be predicted from precursor measures. Results showed that the children with dyslexia were significantly behind in all reading and spelling measures at pretest. During the intervention, the children with dyslexia made more progress on GPC, (pseudo)word decoding accuracy and efficiency, and spelling accuracy than the typical reading group. Furthermore, we found a direct effect of the precursor measures rapid automatized naming, verbal working memory and phoneme deletion on the dyslexic children's progress in GPC speed, and indirect effects of rapid automatized naming and phoneme deletion on word and pseudoword efficiency and word decoding accuracy via the scores at pretest. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Phonics training for English-speaking poor readers.

PubMed

McArthur, Genevieve; Eve, Philippa M; Jones, Kristy; Banales, Erin; Kohnen, Saskia; Anandakumar, Thushara; Larsen, Linda; Marinus, Eva; Wang, Hua-Chen; Castles, Anne

2012-12-12

Around 5% of English speakers have a significant problem with learning to read words. Poor word readers are often trained to use letter-sound rules to improve their reading skills. This training is commonly called phonics. Well over 100 studies have administered some form of phonics training to poor word readers. However, there are surprisingly few systematic reviews or meta-analyses of these studies. The most well-known review was done by the National Reading Panel (Ehri 2001) 12 years ago and needs updating. The most recent review (Suggate 2010) focused solely on children and did not include unpublished studies. The primary aim of this review was to measure the effect that phonics training has on the literacy skills of English-speaking children, adolescents, and adults whose reading was at least one standard deviation (SD), one year, or one grade below the expected level, despite no reported problems that could explain their impaired ability to learn to read. A secondary objective was to explore the impact of various factors, such as length of training or training group size, that might moderate the effect of phonics training on poor word reading skills. We searched the following databases in July 2012: CENTRAL 2012 (Issue 6), MEDLINE 1948 to June week 3 2012, EMBASE 1980 to 2012 week 26, DARE 2013 (Issue 6), ERIC (1966 to current), PsycINFO (1806 to current), CINAHL (1938 to current), Science Citation Index (1970 to 29 June 2012), Social Science Citation Index (1970 to 29 June 2012), Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science (1990 to 29 June 2012), Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Science & Humanities (1990 to 29 June 2012), ZETOC, Index to Theses-UK and Ireland, ClinicalTrials.gov, ICTRP, the metaRegister of Controlled Trials, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, DART Europe E-theses Portal, Australasian Digital Theses Program, Education Research Theses, Electronic Theses Online System, Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. Theses Canada portal, www.dissertation.com, and www.thesisabstracts.com. We also contacted experts and examined the reference lists of published studies. We included studies that use randomisation, quasi-randomisation, or minimisation to allocate participants to either a phonics intervention group (phonics alone, phonics and phoneme awareness training, or phonics and irregular word reading training) or a control group (no training or alternative training, such as maths). Participants were English-speaking children, adolescents, or adults whose word reading was below the level expected for their age for no known reason (that is, they had adequate attention and no known physical, neurological, or psychological problems). Two review authors independently selected studies, assessed risk of bias, and extracted data. We found 11 studies that met the criteria for this review. They involved 736 participants. We measured the effect of phonics training on eight outcomes. The amount of evidence for each outcome varied considerably, ranging from 10 studies for word reading accuracy to one study for nonword reading fluency. The effect sizes for the outcomes were: word reading accuracy standardised mean difference (SMD) 0.47 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.06 to 0.88; 10 studies), nonword reading accuracy SMD 0.76 (95% CI 0.25 to 1.27; eight studies), word reading fluency SMD -0.51 (95% CI -1.14 to 0.13; two studies), reading comprehension SMD 0.14 (95% CI -0.46 to 0.74; three studies), spelling SMD 0.36 (95% CI -0.27 to 1.00; two studies), letter-sound knowledge SMD 0.35 (95% CI 0.04 to 0.65; three studies), and phonological output SMD 0.38 (95% -0.04 to 0.80; four studies). There was one result in a negative direction for nonword reading fluency SMD 0.38 (95% CI -0.55 to 1.32; one study), though this was not statistically significant.We did five subgroup analyses on two outcomes that had sufficient data (word reading accuracy and nonword reading accuracy). The efficacy of phonics training was not moderated significantly by training type (phonics alone versus phonics and phoneme awareness versus phonics and irregular word training), training intensity (less than two hours per week versus at least two hours per week), training duration (less than three months versus at least three months), training group size (one-on-one versus small group training), or training administrator (human administration versus computer administration). Phonics training appears to be effective for improving some reading skills. Specifically, statistically significant effects were found for nonword reading accuracy (large effect), word reading accuracy (moderate effect), and letter-sound knowledge (small-to-moderate effect). For several other outcomes, there were small or moderate effect sizes that did not reach statistical significance but may be meaningful: word reading fluency, spelling, phonological output, and reading comprehension. The effect for nonword reading fluency, which was measured in only one study, was in a negative direction, but this was not statistically significant.Future studies of phonics training need to improve the reporting of procedures used for random sequence generation, allocation concealment, and blinding of participants, personnel, and outcome assessment.

Evidence-Based Reading Instruction for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders

PubMed Central

Whalon, Kelly J.; Al Otaiba, Stephanie; Delano, Monica E.

2009-01-01

Legislation mandates that all children, including children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) be taught to read in ways that are consistent with reading research, and target the five components of evidence-based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension strategies. The purpose of this review is to synthesize the literature on reading instruction for children with ASD that encompasses one or more of the five components of reading. The review yielded 11 studies with 61 participants ages 4 to 17. Results indicate that children with ASD can benefit from reading instruction consistent with reading research. Research in this area is still preliminary, and more research is needed to guide practice. Possible directions for future research are provided. PMID:20161582

Who Benefits from Which Reading Intervention in the Primary Years? Match the Intervention with the Reading Profile

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Munro, John

2017-01-01

Reading difficulties may have multiple causes. Effective approaches to reading intervention need to target the specific causes for individual readers. The Early Reading Intervention Knowledge program comprises three intervention pathways: a phonological-phonemic pathway, a phonic-orthographic pathway, and an oral language pathway. This study…

Learning with sublexical information from emerging reading vocabularies in exceptionally early and normal reading development.

PubMed

Thompson, G Brian; Fletcher-Flinn, Claire M; Wilson, Kathryn J; McKay, Michael F; Margrain, Valerie G

2015-03-01

Predictions from theories of the processes of word reading acquisition have rarely been tested against evidence from exceptionally early readers. The theories of Ehri, Share, and Byrne, and an alternative, Knowledge Sources theory, were so tested. The former three theories postulate that full development of context-free letter sounds and awareness of phonemes are required for normal acquisition, while the claim of the alternative is that with or without such, children can use sublexical information from their emerging reading vocabularies to acquire word reading. Results from two independent samples of children aged 3-5, and 5 years, with mean word reading levels of 7 and 9 years respectively, showed underdevelopment of their context-free letter sounds and phoneme awareness, relative to their word reading levels and normal comparison samples. Despite such underdevelopment, these exceptional readers engaged in a form of phonological recoding that enabled pseudoword reading, at the level of older-age normal controls matched on word reading level. Moreover, in the 5-year-old sample further experiments showed that, relative to normal controls, they had a bias toward use of sublexical information from their reading vocabularies for phonological recoding of heterophonic pseudowords with irregular consistent spelling, and were superior in accessing word meanings independently of phonology, although only if the readers were without exposure to explicit phonics. The three theories were less satisfactory than the alternative theory in accounting for the learning of the exceptionally early readers. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Level 2 Foundation Units. Key Stage 3: National Strategy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Department for Education and Skills, London (England).

These foundation units are aimed at pupils working within Level 2 entry to Year 7. They are designed to remind pupils what they know and take them forward. The units also will teach phonics knowledge from consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words to long vowel phonemes. The writing units focus on developing the following skills: understanding what a…

Licensure tests for special education teachers: how well they assess knowledge of reading instruction and mathematics.

PubMed

Stotsky, Sandra

2009-01-01

To determine the extent to which knowledge of evidence-based reading instruction and mathematics is assessed on licensure tests for prospective special education teachers, this study drew on information provided by Educational Testing Service (ETS), the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, and National Evaluation Systems (now Evaluation Systems group of Pearson). It estimated the percentage of test items on phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary knowledge and on mathematics content. It also analyzed descriptions of ETS's tests of "principles of teaching and learning." Findings imply that prospective special education teachers should be required to take both a dedicated test of evidence-based reading instructional knowledge, as in California, Massachusetts, and Virginia, and a test of mathematical knowledge, as in Massachusetts. States must design their own tests of teaching principles to assess knowledge of evidence-based educational theories.

Relating Pitch Awareness to Phonemic Awareness in Children: Implications for Tone-Deafness and Dyslexia

PubMed Central

Loui, Psyche; Kroog, Kenneth; Zuk, Jennifer; Winner, Ellen; Schlaug, Gottfried

2011-01-01

Language and music are complex cognitive and neural functions that rely on awareness of one's own sound productions. Information on the awareness of vocal pitch, and its relation to phonemic awareness which is crucial for learning to read, will be important for understanding the relationship between tone-deafness and developmental language disorders such as dyslexia. Here we show that phonemic awareness skills are positively correlated with pitch perception–production skills in children. Children between the ages of seven and nine were tested on pitch perception and production, phonemic awareness, and IQ. Results showed a significant positive correlation between pitch perception–production and phonemic awareness, suggesting that the relationship between musical and linguistic sound processing is intimately linked to awareness at the level of pitch and phonemes. Since tone-deafness is a pitch-related impairment and dyslexia is a deficit of phonemic awareness, we suggest that dyslexia and tone-deafness may have a shared and/or common neural basis. PMID:21687467

EFFECT OF METHOD OF READING TRAINING ON INITIAL LEARNING AND TRANSFER.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

JEFFREY, W.E.; SAMUELS, S. JAY

IN A THREE-STAGE STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF THE PHONIC AND LOOK-SAY METHODS OF READING ON THE TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS, 60 KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN WERE DIVIDED INTO A LETTER GROUP, A WORD GROUP, AND A CONTROL GROUP. MATERIALS USED WERE SIX GRAPHEMES DESIGNED DIFFERENTLY FROM ENGLISH LETTERS AND ASSIGNED TO SIX SINGLE ENGLISH PHONEMES. DURING STAGE…

Receptive Vocabulary and Cross-Language Transfer of Phonemic Awareness in Kindergarten Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Atwill, Kim; Blanchard, Jay; Gorin, Joanna S.; Burstein, Karen

2007-01-01

The authors investigated the influence of language proficiency on the cross-language transfer (CLT) of phonemic awareness in Spanish-speaking kindergarten students and assessed Spanish and English receptive vocabulary and phonemic awareness abilities. Correlation results indicated positive correlations between phonemic awareness across languages;…

Why elementary teachers might be inadequately prepared to teach reading.

PubMed

Joshi, R Malatesha; Binks, Emily; Hougen, Martha; Dahlgren, Mary E; Ocker-Dean, Emily; Smith, Dennie L

2009-01-01

Several national reports have suggested the usefulness of systematic, explicit, synthetic phonics instruction based on English word structure along with wide reading of quality literature for supporting development in early reading instruction. Other studies have indicated, however, that many in-service teachers are not knowledgeable in the basic concepts of the English language. They may be well versed in children's literature but not know how to address the basic building blocks of language and reading. The authors hypothesized that one of the reasons for this situation is that many instructors responsible for training future elementary teachers are not familiar with the concepts of the linguistic features of English language. This hypothesis was tested by administering a survey of language concepts to 78 instructors. The results showed that even though teacher educators were familiar with syllabic knowledge, they performed poorly on concepts relating to morphemes and phonemes. In a second study, 40 instructors were interviewed about best practices in teaching components and subskills of reading. Eighty percent of instructors defined phonological awareness as letter-sound correspondence. They also did not mention synthetic phonics as a desirable method to use for beginning reading instruction, particularly for students at risk for reading difficulties. In conclusion, providing professional development experiences related to language concepts to instructors could provide them the necessary knowledge of language concepts related to early literacy instruction, which they could then integrate into their preservice reading courses.

Initial Insights into Phoneme Awareness Intervention for Children with Complex Communication Needs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clendon, Sally; Gillon, Gail; Yoder, David

2005-01-01

This study provides insights into the benefits of phoneme awareness intervention for children with complex communication needs (CCN). The specific aims of the study were: (1) to determine whether phoneme awareness skills can be successfully trained in children with CCN; and (2) to observe any transfer effects to phoneme awareness tasks not…

Differences in Growth Reading Patterns for at-Risk Spanish-Monolingual Children as a Function of a Tier 2 Intervention.

PubMed

Crespo, Patricia; Jiménez, Juan E; Rodríguez, Cristina; Baker, Doris; Park, Yonghan

2018-03-09

The present study compares the patterns of growth of beginning reading skills (i.e., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) of Spanish speaking monolingual students who received a Tier 2 reading intervention with students who did not receive the intervention. All the students in grades K-2 were screened at the beginning of the year to confirm their risk status. A quasi-experimental longitudinal design was used: the treatment group received a supplemental program in small groups of 3 to 5 students, for 30 minutes daily from November to June. The control group did not receive it. All students were assessed three times during the academic year. A hierarchical linear growth modeling was conducted and differences on growth rate were found in vocabulary in kindergarten (p < .001; variance explained = 77.0%), phonemic awareness in kindergarten (p < .001; variance explained = 43.7%) and first grade (p < .01; variance explained = 15.2%), and finally we also find significant growth differences for second grade in oral reading fluency (p < .05; variance explained = 15.1%) and retell task (p < .05; variance explained = 14.5%). Children at risk for reading disabilities in Spanish can improve their skills when they receive explicit instruction in the context of Response to Intervention (RtI). Findings are discussed for each skill in the context of implementing a Tier 2 small group intervention within an RtI approach. Implications for practice in the Spanish educational context are also discussed for children who are struggling with reading.

Relationships between Categorical Perception of Phonemes, Phoneme Awareness, and Visual Attention Span in Developmental Dyslexia.

PubMed

Zoubrinetzky, Rachel; Collet, Gregory; Serniclaes, Willy; Nguyen-Morel, Marie-Ange; Valdois, Sylviane

2016-01-01

We tested the hypothesis that the categorical perception deficit of speech sounds in developmental dyslexia is related to phoneme awareness skills, whereas a visual attention (VA) span deficit constitutes an independent deficit. Phoneme awareness tasks, VA span tasks and categorical perception tasks of phoneme identification and discrimination using a d/t voicing continuum were administered to 63 dyslexic children and 63 control children matched on chronological age. Results showed significant differences in categorical perception between the dyslexic and control children. Significant correlations were found between categorical perception skills, phoneme awareness and reading. Although VA span correlated with reading, no significant correlations were found between either categorical perception or phoneme awareness and VA span. Mediation analyses performed on the whole dyslexic sample suggested that the effect of categorical perception on reading might be mediated by phoneme awareness. This relationship was independent of the participants' VA span abilities. Two groups of dyslexic children with a single phoneme awareness or a single VA span deficit were then identified. The phonologically impaired group showed lower categorical perception skills than the control group but categorical perception was similar in the VA span impaired dyslexic and control children. The overall findings suggest that the link between categorical perception, phoneme awareness and reading is independent from VA span skills. These findings provide new insights on the heterogeneity of developmental dyslexia. They suggest that phonological processes and VA span independently affect reading acquisition.

Relationships between Categorical Perception of Phonemes, Phoneme Awareness, and Visual Attention Span in Developmental Dyslexia

PubMed Central

Zoubrinetzky, Rachel; Collet, Gregory; Serniclaes, Willy; Nguyen-Morel, Marie-Ange; Valdois, Sylviane

2016-01-01

We tested the hypothesis that the categorical perception deficit of speech sounds in developmental dyslexia is related to phoneme awareness skills, whereas a visual attention (VA) span deficit constitutes an independent deficit. Phoneme awareness tasks, VA span tasks and categorical perception tasks of phoneme identification and discrimination using a d/t voicing continuum were administered to 63 dyslexic children and 63 control children matched on chronological age. Results showed significant differences in categorical perception between the dyslexic and control children. Significant correlations were found between categorical perception skills, phoneme awareness and reading. Although VA span correlated with reading, no significant correlations were found between either categorical perception or phoneme awareness and VA span. Mediation analyses performed on the whole dyslexic sample suggested that the effect of categorical perception on reading might be mediated by phoneme awareness. This relationship was independent of the participants’ VA span abilities. Two groups of dyslexic children with a single phoneme awareness or a single VA span deficit were then identified. The phonologically impaired group showed lower categorical perception skills than the control group but categorical perception was similar in the VA span impaired dyslexic and control children. The overall findings suggest that the link between categorical perception, phoneme awareness and reading is independent from VA span skills. These findings provide new insights on the heterogeneity of developmental dyslexia. They suggest that phonological processes and VA span independently affect reading acquisition. PMID:26950210

Delivering phonological and phonics training within whole-class teaching.

PubMed

Shapiro, Laura R; Solity, Jonathan

2008-12-01

Early, intensive phonological awareness and phonics training is widely held to be beneficial for children with poor phonological awareness. However, most studies have delivered this training separately from children's normal whole-class reading lessons. We examined whether integrating this training into whole class, mixed-ability reading lessons could impact on children with poor phonological awareness, whilst also benefiting normally developing readers. Teachers delivered the training within a broad reading programme to whole classes of children from Reception to the end of Year 1 (N=251). A comparison group of children received standard teaching methods (N=213). Children's literacy was assessed at the beginning of Reception, and then at the end of each year until 1 year post-intervention. The strategy significantly impacted on reading performance for normally developing readers and those with poor phonological awareness, vastly reducing the incidence of reading difficulties from 20% in comparison schools to 5% in intervention schools. Phonological and phonics training is highly effective for children with poor phonological awareness, even when incorporated into whole-class teaching.

Language and reading instruction in early years' classrooms: the knowledge and self-rated ability of Australian teachers.

PubMed

Stark, Hannah L; Snow, Pamela C; Eadie, Patricia A; Goldfeld, Sharon R

2016-04-01

This study sought to investigate the level of knowledge of language constructs in a cohort of Australian teachers and to examine their self-rated ability and confidence in that knowledge. Seventy-eight teachers from schools across the Australian state of Victoria completed a questionnaire which included items from existing measures, as well as newly developed items. Consistent with a number of earlier Australian and international studies, teachers' explicit and implicit knowledge of basic linguistic constructs was limited and highly variable. A statistically significant correlation was found between (1) total self-rated ability and (2) years since qualification and experience teaching the early years of primary school; however, no relationship was found between self-rated ability and overall performance on knowledge items. Self-rated ability to teach phonemic awareness and phonics had no relationship with demonstrated knowledge in these areas. Teachers were most likely to rate their ability to teach skills including spelling, phonics, comprehension or vocabulary as either moderate or very good. This was despite most respondents demonstrating limited knowledge and stating that they did not feel confident answering questions about their knowledge in these areas. The findings from this study confirm that in the field of language and literacy instruction, there is a gap between the knowledge that is theoretically requisite, and therefore expected, and the actual knowledge of many teachers. This finding challenges current pre-service teacher education and in-service professional learning.

Do textbooks used in university reading education courses conform to the instructional recommendations of the national reading panel?

PubMed

Malatesha Joshi, R; Binks, Emily; Graham, Lori; Ocker-Dean, Emily; Smith, Dennie L; Boulware-Gooden, Regina

2009-01-01

Two reasons may be responsible for the poor grasp of the linguistic concepts related to literacy acquisition by preservice and in-service teachers: a lack of attention given to such concepts by teacher educators (college faculty members) and a lack of relevant information provided in the textbooks used in college courses. In an earlier study, the authors found that many teacher educators involved in the training of preservice and in-service teachers were not well acquainted with these concepts. In this study, the authors examined the extent to which textbooks used in reading education courses contain the information about the five components of literacy instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension) recommended by the National Reading Panel. Such scrutiny shows that many textbooks do not adequately cover these five components and the related instructional procedures for teaching them. In addition to the paucity of information about teaching the five components, some textbooks present inaccurate information.

Phonemic Awareness: A Step by Step Approach for Success in Early Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Perez, Idalia Rodriguez

2008-01-01

This guide will help teach phonemic awareness to Pre K-3 students. It presents phonemic awareness as a sophisticated branch of phonological awareness through interactive activities that allows the student to succeed in learning the sounds represented by the letters of the alphabet. The book is designed to provide easy-to-follow suggestions for:…

Nurturing Phonemic Awareness and Alphabetic Knowledge in Pre-Kindergartners.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Steinhaus, Patricia L.

Reading research continues to identify phonemic awareness and knowledge of the alphabetic principle as key factors in the literacy acquisition process and to indicate that they greatly facilitate decoding efforts. While research indicates that phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge are necessary to literacy acquisition, many early childhood…

Fee, Fie, Phonemic Awareness: 130 Prereading Activities for Preschoolers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hohmann, Mary

Noting that phonemic awareness has been identified as an essential skill that prepares children for reading, this book contains 130 phonemic awareness activities suitable for small-group learning in preschools, prekindergarten programs, Head Start programs, child care centers, and home-based programs. Reflecting the teaching strategies of the…

The Influence of Specific Phonemic Awareness Processes on the Reading Comprehension of African American Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Edwards, Oliver W.; Taub, Gordon E.

2016-01-01

Research indicates the primary difference between strong and weak readers is their phonemic awareness skills. However, there is no consensus regarding which specific components of phonemic awareness contribute most robustly to reading comprehension. In this study, the relationship among sound blending, sound segmentation, and reading comprehension…

Influence of Eye Movements, Auditory Perception, and Phonemic Awareness in the Reading Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Megino-Elvira, Laura; Martín-Lobo, Pilar; Vergara-Moragues, Esperanza

2016-01-01

The authors' aim was to analyze the relationship of eye movements, auditory perception, and phonemic awareness with the reading process. The instruments used were the King-Devick Test (saccade eye movements), the PAF test (auditory perception), the PFC (phonemic awareness), the PROLEC-R (lexical process), the Canals reading speed test, and the…

The Use of Handheld Devices for Improved Phonemic Awareness in a Traditional Kindergarten Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Magagna-McBee, Cristy Ann

2010-01-01

Effective teaching strategies that improve the development of phonemic awareness are important to ensure students are fluent readers by third grade. The use of handheld devices to improve phonemic awareness with kindergarten students may be such a strategy, but no research exists that evaluates the use of these devices. This study explored the…

The Influence of Spanish Vocabulary and Phonemic Awareness on Beginning English Reading Development: A Three-Year (K-2nd) Longitudinal Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kelley, Michael F.; Roe, Mary; Blanchard, Jay; Atwill, Kim

2015-01-01

This investigation examined the influence of varying levels of Spanish receptive vocabulary and phonemic awareness ability on beginning English vocabulary, phonemic awareness, word reading fluency, and reading comprehension development across kindergarten through second grade. The 80 respondents were Spanish speaking children with no English…

Phonetic Transcription Training Improves Adults' Explicit Phonemic Awareness: Evidence from Undergraduate Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Werfel, Krystal L.

2017-01-01

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of phonetic transcription training on the explicit phonemic awareness of adults. Fifty undergraduate students enrolled in a phonetic transcription course and 107 control undergraduate students completed a paper-and-pencil measure of explicit phonemic awareness on the first and last days of…

Universal and Language-Specific Constraints on Phonemic Awareness: Evidence from Russian-Hebrew Bilingual Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor; Kogan, Nadya; Walters, Joel

2010-01-01

The study tested phonemic awareness in the two languages of Russian (L1)-Hebrew (L2) sequential bilingual children (N = 20) using phoneme deletion tasks where the phoneme to be deleted occurred word initial, word final, as a singleton, or part of a cluster, in long and short words and stressed and unstressed syllables. The experiments were…

Phoneme Awareness, Visual-Verbal Paired-Associate Learning, and Rapid Automatized Naming as Predictors of Individual Differences in Reading Ability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Warmington, Meesha; Hulme, Charles

2012-01-01

This study examines the concurrent relationships between phoneme awareness, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading skills in 7- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning and RAN, but not phoneme awareness, were unique predictors of word recognition,…

The Role of Phoneme and Onset-Rime Awareness in Second Language Reading Acquisition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haigh, Corinne A.; Savage, Robert; Erdos, Caroline; Genesee, Fred

2011-01-01

This study investigated the link between phoneme and onset-rime awareness and reading outcomes in children learning to read in a second language (L2). Closely matched phoneme and onset-rime awareness tasks were administered in English and French in the spring of kindergarten to English-dominant children in French immersion programmes (n=98).…

Reading in Children With Fragile X Syndrome: Phonological Awareness and Feasibility of Intervention.

PubMed

Adlof, Suzanne M; Klusek, Jessica; Hoffmann, Anne; Chitwood, Kerrie L; Brazendale, Allison; Riley, Karen; Abbeduto, Leonard J; Roberts, Jane E

2018-05-01

Individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS) present with significant deficits in reading skills, but scant research exists to understand the characteristics of the reading delays or best practices for reading instruction with this population. Study 1 examined the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in individuals with FXS. Study 2 evaluated the feasibility of a web-based reading intervention, which incorporated phonological awareness and phonics instruction but was originally developed for mainstream students, for children with FXS. Results suggest that phonological awareness and reading skills are correlated in this population, and that instruction targeting phonological awareness and phonics should not be ruled out for individuals with FXS. Further studies are needed to examine their potential effects.

Improving Preservice Teachers' Phonemic Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Orthographic Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McNeill, Brigid C.

2018-01-01

Few studies have examined the effectiveness of methods to develop preservice teachers' phonemic, morphological and orthographic awareness for spelling instruction. Preservice teachers (n = 86) participated in 10 hours of metalinguistic coursework. The coursework focused on: phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness…

Explicit Instruction in Phonemic Awareness and Phonemically Based Decoding Skills as an Intervention Strategy for Struggling Readers in Whole Language Classrooms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ryder, Janice F.; Tunmer, William E.; Greaney, Keith T.

2008-01-01

The aim of this study was to determine whether explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills would be an effective intervention strategy for children with early reading difficulties in a whole language instructional environment. Twenty-four 6- and 7-year-old struggling readers were randomly assigned to an…

Phonemic Awareness and the Teaching of Reading. A Position Statement from the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

International Reading Association, Newark, DE.

This position paper considers the complex relation between phonemic awareness and reading. The paper seeks to define phonemic awareness (although there is no single definition), stating that it is typically described as an insight about oral language and in particular about the segmentation of sounds that are used in speech communication. It also…

Assessing the Effects of the "McGraw Hill Phonemic Awareness" Program with Preschool Children with Developmental Delays: A Case Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Isakson, Lisa; Marchand-Martella, Nancy; Martella, Ronald C.

2011-01-01

This study assessed the effects of "McGraw Hill Phonemic Awareness" on the phonemic awareness skills of 5 preschool children with developmental delays. The children received 60 of the 110 lessons included in this program over 5 months. They were pre- and posttested using the kindergarten level Initial Sound Fluency and Phoneme…

An Investigation of Treatment Scheduling for Phonemic Awareness with Kindergartners Who Are at Risk for Reading Difficulties

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ukrainetz, Teresa A.; Ross, Catherine L.; Harm, Heide M.

2009-01-01

Purpose: This study examined 2 schedules of treatment for phonemic awareness. Method: Forty-one 5- to 6-year-old kindergartners, including 22 English learners, with low letter-name and first-sound knowledge received 11 hr of phonemic awareness treatment: concentrated (CP, 3x/wk to December), dispersed (DP, 1x/wk to March), and dispersed vocabulary…

Do students with and without lexical retrieval weaknesses respond differently to instruction?

PubMed

Allor, J H; Fuchs, D; Mathes, P G

2001-01-01

Deficits in phonological processing are theorized to be responsible for at least some reading disabilities. A considerable amount of research demonstrates that many students can be taught one of these phonological processes-phonemic awareness. However, not all students have responded favorably to this instruction. Research has suggested that these nonresponders may be unable to retrieve phonological codes quickly from long-term memory. The purpose of this study was to examine whether such a deficiency, which we refer to as lexical retrieval weakness, blunts the effectiveness of combined phonemic awareness and decoding training. To this end, we compared the effectiveness of phonemic awareness and decoding training for students with and without severe lexical retrieval weaknesses. All students in both groups demonstrated poor phonemic awareness. The results suggested that students with relatively strong lexical retrieval skill responded more favorably to beginning reading instruction than did students with weak lexical retrieval skill. In other words, lexical retrieval weakness may influence reading development independently of the effects of phonemic awareness. Implications for instruction are discussed.

Word-Level Reading Achievement and Behavioral Inattention: Exploring Their Overlap and Relations with Naming Speed and Phonemic Awareness in a Community Sample of Children

PubMed Central

Martinussen, Rhonda; Grimbos, Teresa; Ferrari, Julia L. S.

2014-01-01

This study investigated the contribution of naming speed and phonemic awareness to teacher inattention ratings and word-level reading proficiency in 79 first grade children (43 boys, 36 girls). Participants completed the cognitive and reading measures midway through the school year. Teacher ratings of inattention were obtained for each child at the same time point. A path analysis revealed that behavioral inattention had a significant direct effect on word reading proficiency as well as significant indirect effects through phonemic awareness and naming speed. For pseudoword reading proficiency, the effects of inattention were indirect only through phonemic awareness and naming speed. A regression analysis indicated that naming speed, but not phonemic awareness, was significantly associated with teacher inattention ratings controlling for word reading proficiency. The findings highlight the need to better understand the role of behavioral inattention in the development of emergent literacy skills and reading proficiency. PMID:25178628

A Short Report: Word-Level Phonological and Lexical Characteristics Interact to Influence Phoneme Awareness

PubMed Central

Hogan, Tiffany P.

2010-01-01

In this study, we examined the influence of word-level phonological and lexical characteristics on early phoneme awareness. Typically-developing children, ages 61–78 months, completed a phoneme-based, odd-one-out task that included consonant-vowel-consonant word sets (e.g., “chair-chain-ship”) that varied orthogonally by a phonological characteristic, sound-contrast similarity (similar vs. dissimilar), and a lexical characteristic, neighborhood density (dense vs. sparse). In a subsample of the participants – those with the highest vocabularies – results were in line with a predicted interactive effect of phonological and lexical characteristics on phoneme awareness performance: word sets contrasting similar sounds were less likely to yield correct responses in words from sparse neighborhoods than words from dense neighborhoods. Word sets contrasting dissimilar sounds were most likely to yield correct responses regardless of the words’ neighborhood density. Based on these findings, theories of early phoneme awareness development should consider both word-level (e.g., phonological and lexical characteristics) and child-level (e.g., vocabulary knowledge) influences on phoneme awareness performance. Attention to these word-level item influences is predicted to result in more sensitive and specific measures of reading risk. PMID:20574064

Word-level reading achievement and behavioral inattention: exploring their overlap and relations with naming speed and phonemic awareness in a community sample of children.

PubMed

Martinussen, Rhonda; Grimbos, Teresa; Ferrari, Julia L S

2014-11-01

This study investigated the contribution of naming speed and phonemic awareness to teacher inattention ratings and word-level reading proficiency in 79 first grade children (43 boys, 36 girls). Participants completed the cognitive and reading measures midway through the school year. Teacher ratings of inattention were obtained for each child at the same time point. A path analysis revealed that behavioral inattention had a significant direct effect on word reading proficiency as well as significant indirect effects through phonemic awareness and naming speed. For pseudoword reading proficiency, the effects of inattention were indirect only through phonemic awareness and naming speed. A regression analysis indicated that naming speed, but not phonemic awareness, was significantly associated with teacher inattention ratings controlling for word reading proficiency. The findings highlight the need to better understand the role of behavioral inattention in the development of emergent literacy skills and reading proficiency. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Effectiveness of Treatment Approaches for Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

PubMed Central

Galuschka, Katharina; Ise, Elena; Krick, Kathrin; Schulte-Körne, Gerd

2014-01-01

Children and adolescents with reading disabilities experience a significant impairment in the acquisition of reading and spelling skills. Given the emotional and academic consequences for children with persistent reading disorders, evidence-based interventions are critically needed. The present meta-analysis extracts the results of all available randomized controlled trials. The aims were to determine the effectiveness of different treatment approaches and the impact of various factors on the efficacy of interventions. The literature search for published randomized-controlled trials comprised an electronic search in the databases ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Cochrane, and an examination of bibliographical references. To check for unpublished trials, we searched the websites clinicaltrials.com and ProQuest, and contacted experts in the field. Twenty-two randomized controlled trials with a total of 49 comparisons of experimental and control groups could be included. The comparisons evaluated five reading fluency trainings, three phonemic awareness instructions, three reading comprehension trainings, 29 phonics instructions, three auditory trainings, two medical treatments, and four interventions with coloured overlays or lenses. One trial evaluated the effectiveness of sunflower therapy and another investigated the effectiveness of motor exercises. The results revealed that phonics instruction is not only the most frequently investigated treatment approach, but also the only approach whose efficacy on reading and spelling performance in children and adolescents with reading disabilities is statistically confirmed. The mean effect sizes of the remaining treatment approaches did not reach statistical significance. The present meta-analysis demonstrates that severe reading and spelling difficulties can be ameliorated with appropriate treatment. In order to be better able to provide evidence-based interventions to children and adolescent with reading disabilities, research should intensify the application of blinded randomized controlled trials. PMID:24587110

The Effect of Phoneme Awareness Instruction on Students in Small Group and Whole Class Settings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

VanBoden, Angelique Fleurette

2011-01-01

Phoneme awareness instruction plays a crucial role in reading acquisition for young children. While this early literacy topic has been studied for over 30 years, and cited by the National Reading Panel Report (2000) as an important area for further research, no reports to date explore the influence of instructional group size on phoneme awareness…

The Effectiveness of Synthetic Phonics in the Development of Early Reading Skills among Struggling Young ESL Readers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jamaludin, Khairul Azhar; Alias, Norlidah; Mohd Khir, Roselina Johari; DeWitt, Dorothy; Kenayathula, Husaina Banu

2016-01-01

A quasi-experimental research design was used to investigate the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in the development of early reading skills among struggling young English as a second language (ESL) readers in a rural school. The pretest and posttest, adapted from the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) for Preschool Students and…

The Relative Predictive Contribution and Causal Role of Phoneme Awareness, Rhyme Awareness and Verbal Short-Term Memory in Reading Skills: A Review

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Melby-Lervag, Monica

2012-01-01

The acknowledgement that educational achievement is highly dependent on successful reading development, has led to extensive research on its underlying factors. Evidence clearly suggests that the relation between reading skills, phoneme awareness, rhyme awareness, and verbal short-term memory is more than a mere association. A strong argument has…

Differing effects of two synthetic phonics programmes on early reading development.

PubMed

Shapiro, Laura R; Solity, Jonathan

2016-06-01

Synthetic phonics is the widely accepted approach for teaching reading in English: Children are taught to sound out the letters in a word then blend these sounds together. We compared the impact of two synthetic phonics programmes on early reading. Children received Letters and Sounds (L&S; 7 schools) which teaches multiple letter-sound mappings or Early Reading Research (ERR; 10 schools) which teaches only the most consistent mappings plus frequent words by sight. We measured phonological awareness (PA) and reading from school entry to the end of the second (all schools) or third school year (4 ERR, 3 L&S schools). Phonological awareness was significantly related to all reading measures for the whole sample. However, there was a closer relationship between PA and exception word reading for children receiving the L&S programme. The programmes were equally effective overall, but their impact on reading significantly interacted with school-entry PA: Children with poor PA at school entry achieved higher reading attainments under ERR (significant group difference on exception word reading at the end of the first year), whereas children with good PA performed equally well under either programme. The more intensive phonics programme (L&S) heightened the association between PA and exception word reading. Although the programmes were equally effective for most children, results indicate potential benefits of ERR for children with poor PA. We suggest that phonics programmes could be simplified to teach only the most consistent mappings plus frequent words by sight. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

Neuron recycling for learning the alphabetic principles.

PubMed

Scliar-Cabral, Leonor

2014-01-01

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss an approach to the phonic method of learning-teaching early literacy development, namely that the visual neurons must be recycled to recognize the small differences among pertinent letter features. In addition to the challenge of segmenting the speech chain and the syllable for learning the alphabetic principles, neuroscience has demonstrated another major challenge: neurons in mammals are programmed to process visual signals symmetrically. In order to develop early literacy, visual neurons must be recycled to overcome this initial programming together with phonological awareness, expanding it with the ability to delimit words, including clitics, as well as assigning stress to words. To achieve this goal, Scliar's Early Literacy Development System was proposed and tested. Sixteen subjects (10 girls and 6 boys) comprised the experimental group (mean age 6.02 years), and 16 subjects (7 girls and 9 boys) formed the control group (mean age 6.10 years). The research instruments were a psychosociolinguistic questionnaire to reveal the subjects' profile and a post-test battery of tests. At the beginning of the experiment, the experimental group was submitted to an intervention program based on Scliar's Early Literacy Development System. One of the tests is discussed in this paper, the grapheme-phoneme test: subjects had to read aloud a pseudoword with 4 graphemes, signaled by the experimenter and designed to assess the subject's ability to convert a grapheme into its correspondent phoneme. The average value for the test group was 25.0 correct answers (SD = 11.4); the control group had an average of 14.3 correct answers (SD = 10.6): The difference was significant. The experimental results validate Scliar's Early Literacy Development System and indicate the need to redesign early literacy development methods. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Teaching Phoneme Awareness to Pre-Literate Children with Speech Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hesketh, Anne; Dima, Evgenia; Nelson, Veronica

2007-01-01

Background: Awareness of individual phonemes in words is a late-acquired level of phonological awareness that usually develops in the early school years. It is generally agreed to have a close relationship with early literacy development, but its role in speech change is less well understood. Speech and language therapy for children with speech…

The Relative Predictive Contribution and Causal Role of Phoneme Awareness, Rhyme Awareness, and Verbal Short-Term Memory in Reading Skills: A Review

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Melby-Lervag, Monica

2012-01-01

The acknowledgement that educational achievement is highly dependent on successful reading development has led to extensive research on its underlying factors. A strong argument has been made for a causal relationship between reading and phoneme awareness; similarly, causal relations have been suggested for reading with short-term memory and rhyme…

How psychological science informs the teaching of reading.

PubMed

Rayner, K; Foorman, B R; Perfetti, C A; Pesetsky, D; Seidenberg, M S

2001-11-01

This monograph discusses research, theory, and practice relevant to how children learn to read English. After an initial overview of writing systems, the discussion summarizes research from developmental psychology on children's language competency when they enter school and on the nature of early reading development. Subsequent sections review theories of learning to read, the characteristics of children who do not learn to read (i.e., who have developmental dyslexia), research from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience on skilled reading, and connectionist models of learning to read. The implications of the research findings for learning to read and teaching reading are discussed. Next, the primary methods used to teach reading (phonics and whole language) are summarized. The final section reviews laboratory and classroom studies on teaching reading. From these different sources of evidence, two inescapable conclusions emerge: (a) Mastering the alphabetic principle (that written symbols are associated with phonemes) is essential to becoming proficient in the skill of reading, and (b) methods that teach this principle directly are more effective than those that do not (especially for children who are at risk in some way for having difficulty learning to read). Using whole-language activities to supplement phonics instruction does help make reading fun and meaningful for children, but ultimately, phonics instruction is critically important because it helps beginning readers understand the alphabetic principle and learn new words. Thus, elementary-school teachers who make the alphabetic principle explicit are most effective in helping their students become skilled, independent readers.

First-Year Teacher Knowledge of Phonemic Awareness and Its Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cheesman, Elaine A.; McGuire, Joan M.; Shankweiler, Donald; Coyne, Michael

2009-01-01

Converging evidence has identified phonemic awareness (PA) as one of five essential components of beginning reading instruction. Evidence suggests that many teachers do not have the recommended knowledge or skills sufficient to provide effective PA instruction within the context of scientifically validated reading education. This study examines…

Preschool Teacher Knowledge and Skills: Phonemic Awareness and Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Billow, Cecilia

2017-01-01

The extent of phonemic awareness knowledge and skills early childhood teachers bring to beginning literacy instruction lays the foundation upon which reading success is built for preschool children in their care. A significant number of preschool children receive their first literacy instruction in community-based or Head Start preschools.…

Teaching Phonemic Awareness through Children's Literature and Experiences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jurenka, Nancy

2006-01-01

Teaching phonemic awareness can be boring and repetitive in the hands of a teacher who wishes to just use a workbook approach. This delightful book packs loads of fun into 75 lesson plans, providing educators with myriad creative strategies for integrating word study with children's picture books. Each lesson includes a read-aloud book…

How Important Is Teaching Phonemic Awareness to Children Learning to Read in Spanish?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goldenberg, Claude; Tolar, Tammy D.; Reese, Leslie; Francis, David J.; Bazán, Antonio Ray; Mejía-Arauz, Rebeca

2014-01-01

This comparative study examines relationships between phonemic awareness and Spanish reading skill acquisition among three groups of Spanish-speaking first and second graders: children in Mexico receiving reading instruction in Spanish and children in the United States receiving reading instruction in either Spanish or English. Children were…

Early Orthographic Influences on Phonemic Awareness Tasks: Evidence from a Preschool Training Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Castles, Anne; Wilson, Katherine; Coltheart, Max

2011-01-01

Experienced readers show influences of orthographic knowledge on tasks ostensibly tapping phonemic awareness. Here we draw on data from an experimental training study to demonstrate that even preschoolers show influences of their emerging orthographic abilities in such tasks. A total of 40 children were taught some letter-sound correspondences but…

Phoneme Awareness, Vocabulary and Word Decoding in Monolingual and Bilingual Dutch Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Janssen, Marije; Bosman, Anna M. T.; Leseman, Paul P. M.

2013-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingually raised children in the Netherlands, who receive literacy instruction in their second language only, show an advantage on Dutch phoneme-awareness tasks compared with monolingual Dutch-speaking children. Language performance of a group of 47 immigrant first-grade children with various…

Phonemic Awareness and Middle-Ear Disease among Bedouin Arabs in Israel.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Abu-Rabia, Salim

2002-01-01

Investigates the effect of middle-ear infections on phonemic awareness on first-grade Bedouin Arab elementary school children in northern Israel. Divides 49 children who were screened according to their infant medical records into two groups: one with repeated middle-ear infection and one without. Indicates a nonsignificant effect of middle-ear…

African American English Dialect and Performance on Nonword Spelling and Phonemic Awareness Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kohler, Candida T.; Bahr, Ruth Huntley; Silliman, Elaine R.; Bryant, Judith Becker; Apel, Kenn; Wilkinson, Louise C.

2007-01-01

Purpose: To evaluate the role of dialect on phonemic awareness and nonword spelling tasks. These tasks were selected for their reliance on phonological and orthographic processing, which may be influenced by dialect use. Method: Eighty typically developing African American children in Grades 1 and 3 were first screened for dialect use and then…

Phonemic Awareness Is a More Important Predictor of Orthographic Processing than Rapid Serial Naming: Evidence from Russian

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rakhlin, Natalia; Cardoso-Martins, Cláudia; Grigorenko, Elena L.

2014-01-01

We studied the relationship between rapid serial naming (RSN) and orthographic processing in Russian, an asymmetrically transparent orthography. Ninety-six students (M age = 13.73) completed tests of word and pseudoword reading fluency, spelling, orthographic choice, phonological choice, phoneme awareness (PA), and RSN. PA was a better predictor…

Music and Phonemic Awareness: The Kindergarten Connection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Newland, Cheyrl M.

2013-01-01

With the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2001), schools have become aware of the consequences of successfully teaching children to read. A major building block in early childhood education includes the decoding of phonemes, rhymes, and the rhythm of spoken and written word. As reading is crucial to success in any subject area or career…

Prosodic and Phonemic Awareness in Children's Reading of Long and Short Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wade-Woolley, Lesly

2016-01-01

Phonemic and prosodic awareness are both phonological processes that operate at different levels: the former at the level of the individual sound segment and the latter at the suprasegmental level across syllables. Both have been shown to be related to word reading in young readers. In this study we examine how these processes are differentially…

Acquisition of linguistic procedures for printed words: neuropsychological implications for learning.

PubMed

Berninger, V W

1988-10-01

A microcomputerized experiment, administered to 45 children in the 2nd, 5th, and 8th month of first grade, manipulated three variables: (a) stimulus unit (whole word or letter-by-letter presentation), (b) nature of stimulus information (phonically regular words, phonically irregular words, nonsense words, and letter strings, which differ in whether phonemic, orthographic, semantic, and/or name codes are available), and (c) linguistic task (lexical decision, naming, and written reproduction). Letter-by-letter presentation resulted in more accurate lexical decision and naming but not more accurate written reproduction. Interactions between nature of stimulus information and linguistic task occurred. Throughout the year, accuracy was greater for lexical decision than for naming or written reproduction. The superiority of lexical decision cannot be attributed to the higher probability of correct responses on a binary choice task because only consistently correct responses on repeated trials were analyzed. The earlier development of lexical decision, a receptive task, than of naming or written reproduction, production tasks, suggests that hidden units (Hinton & Sejnowski, 1986) in tertiary cortical areas may abstract visual-linguistic associations in printed words before production units in primary cortical areas can produce printed words orally or graphically.

Discrimination Training of Phonemic Contrasts Enhances Phonological Processing in Mainstream School Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, D.R.; Rosenberg, J.F.; Coleman, J.S.

2005-01-01

Auditory perceptual learning has been proposed as effective for remediating impaired language and for enhancing normal language development. We examined the effect of phonemic contrast discrimination training on the discrimination of whole words and on phonological awareness in 8- to 10-year-old mainstream school children. Eleven phonemic contrast…

Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: a meta-analytic review.

PubMed

Melby-Lervåg, Monica; Lyster, Solveig-Alma Halaas; Hulme, Charles

2012-03-01

The authors report a systematic meta-analytic review of the relationships among 3 of the most widely studied measures of children's phonological skills (phonemic awareness, rime awareness, and verbal short-term memory) and children's word reading skills. The review included both extreme group studies and correlational studies with unselected samples (235 studies were included, and 995 effect sizes were calculated). Results from extreme group comparisons indicated that children with dyslexia show a large deficit on phonemic awareness in relation to typically developing children of the same age (pooled effect size estimate: -1.37) and children matched on reading level (pooled effect size estimate: -0.57). There were significantly smaller group deficits on both rime awareness and verbal short-term memory (pooled effect size estimates: rime skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.93, and reading-level controls, -0.37; verbal short-term memory skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.71, and reading-level controls, -0.09). Analyses of studies of unselected samples showed that phonemic awareness was the strongest correlate of individual differences in word reading ability and that this effect remained reliable after controlling for variations in both verbal short-term memory and rime awareness. These findings support the pivotal role of phonemic awareness as a predictor of individual differences in reading development. We discuss whether such a relationship is a causal one and the implications of research in this area for current approaches to the teaching of reading and interventions for children with reading difficulties.

The Relation between Speech Perception and Phonemic Awareness: Evidence from Low-SES Children and Children with Chronic OM.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nittrouer, Susan

1996-01-01

This study of 41 children (ages 7 and 8) studied the effects of low socioeconomic status (SES) and chronic otitis media (OM) on speech perception and phonemic awareness. Findings indicated the children with low SES did poorly on both kinds of tasks whether or not they had chronic OM. (CR)

Age and Schooling Effects on Early Literacy and Phoneme Awareness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cunningham, Anna; Carroll, Julia

2011-01-01

Previous research on age and schooling effects is largely restricted to studies of children who begin formal schooling at 6 years of age, and the measures of phoneme awareness used have typically lacked sensitivity for beginning readers. Our study addresses these issues by testing 4 to 6 year-olds (first 2 years of formal schooling in the United…

Teachers' Perceptions and Pedagogical Content Knowledge of Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williams, Jennifer S.

2012-01-01

In 2011, a small Midwestern school district referred an increasing number of 2nd-4th grade students, with reading problems due to phonetic and phonological awareness deficits, to the district's intervention team. Framed in Shulman's pedagogical content knowledge model and the International Dyslexia Association's phonological deficit theory of…

The Effects of Phonemic Awareness Instruction on the Writing Ability of First Grade At Risk Students.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carro, Dorothy J.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of increased phonemic awareness instruction on the writing ability of At Risk first graders. Twenty-three students from a suburban first grade classroom in Central New Jersey were involved in the study. Twelve at risk students were divided into two groups, each of which received one half hour of…

The Effects of Intervention in Phonemic Awareness on the Reading Achievement of English Language Learners in Kindergarten

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Walter, Nancy

2010-01-01

Students entering school with little knowledge of English do not have the foundation in place to develop reading skills. This lack of foundation puts English Learners at a disadvantage that they struggle to overcome. The purpose of the quantitative study was twofold: (a) to determine whether measures of phonemic awareness are predictive of end of…

Direct and Indirect Effects of Stimulating Phoneme Awareness vs. Other Linguistic Skills in Preschoolers with Co-Occurring Speech and Language Impairments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tyler, Ann A.; Gillon, Gail; Macrae, Toby; Johnson, Roberta L.

2011-01-01

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an integrated phoneme awareness/speech intervention in comparison to an alternating speech/morphosyntax intervention for specific areas targeted by the different interventions, as well as the extent of indirect gains in nontargeted areas. Method: A total of 30 children with co-occurring…

The Effects of Phonemic Awareness Instruction in First Grade on the Reading Scores of Rural Primary Students.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thornton, Linda H.; Vinzant, Rebecca S.

A study investigated the effect of phonemic awareness instruction on the reading ability of first and second grade students. Participants were 100 second graders who had been in 5 first grades at Westside Elementary in Searcy, Arkansas. Using a posttest only control group design and a t test for independent samples, it was found that second grade…

Tell Me about Fred's Fat Foot Again: Four Tips for Successful PA Lessons

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Murray, Bruce A.

2012-01-01

This teaching tip applies research on phoneme awareness (PA) to propose an instructional model for teaching PA. Research suggests children need to learn the identifying features of phonemes to recognize them in spoken words. In the model, teachers focus on one phoneme at a time; make it memorable to children through sound analogies supported by…

Pre-Service Teachers' Knowledge of Phonemic Awareness: Relationship to Perceived Knowledge, Self-Efficacy Beliefs, and Exposure to a Multimedia-Enhanced Lecture

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martinussen, Rhonda; Ferrari, Julia; Aitken, Madison; Willows, Dale

2015-01-01

This study examined the relations among perceived and actual knowledge of phonemic awareness (PA), exposure to PA instruction during practicum, and self-efficacy for teaching PA in a sample of 54 teacher candidates (TCs) enrolled in a 1-year Bachelor of Education program in a Canadian university. It also assessed the effects of a brief…

Phonological Skills and Ability to Perceive Auditorily the Structure of a Word at the Level of a Single Phoneme at Ages 2-6

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suortti, Outi; Lipponen, Lasse

2014-01-01

The present study is the first part of a longitudinal research project investigating whether children become more aware of phonemes or rhyming when they learn letters or letter sounds or even begin to read, and if so how. For the present paper, the phonological awareness of young children aged 2-6 years was analyzed, particularly their auditory…

Effects of Targeted Reading Instruction on Phonological Awareness and Phonic Decoding in Children with Down Syndrome

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cologon, Kathy; Cupples, Linda; Wyver, Shirley

2011-01-01

This research evaluated the effectiveness of reading instruction targeting oral reading and phonological awareness for children with Down syndrome (affecting chromosome 21). The participants were 7 children ranging in age from 2 years, 11 months to 10 years, 8 months. Each child acted as his/her own control, with assessments of language,…

Teaching children with dyslexia to spell in a reading-writers' workshop.

PubMed

Berninger, Virginia W; Lee, Yen-Ling; Abbott, Robert D; Breznitz, Zvia

2013-04-01

To identify effective treatment for both the spelling and word decoding problems in dyslexia, 24 students with dyslexia in grades 4 to 9 were randomly assigned to treatments A (n=12) or B (n=12) in an after-school reading-writers' workshop at the university (thirty 1-h sessions twice a week over 5 months). First, both groups received step 1 treatment of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (gpc) for oral reading. At step 2, treatment A received gpc training for both oral reading and spelling, and treatment B received gpc training for oral reading and phonological awareness. At step 3, treatment A received orthographic spelling strategy and rapid accelerated reading program (RAP) training, and treatment B continued step 2 training. At step 4, treatment A received morphological strategies and RAP training, and treatment B received orthographic spelling strategy training. Each treatment also had the same integrated reading-writing activities, which many school assignments require. Both groups improved significantly in automatic letter writing, spelling real words, compositional fluency, and oral reading (decoding) rate. Treatment A significantly outperformed treatment B in decoding rate after step 3 orthographic training, which in turn uniquely predicted spelling real words. Letter processing rate increased during step 3 RAP training and correlated significantly with two silent reading fluency measures. Adding orthographic strategies with "working memory in mind" to phonics helps students with dyslexia spell and read English words.

Leveled Literacy Intervention. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2017

2017-01-01

"Leveled Literacy Intervention" ("LLI") is a short-term, supplementary, small-group literacy intervention designed to help struggling readers achieve grade-level competency. The intervention provides explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, reading comprehension, oral language skills, and…

Dynamic Assessment of Phonological Awareness for Children with Speech Sound Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gillam, Sandra Laing; Ford, Mikenzi Bentley

2012-01-01

The current study was designed to examine the relationships between performance on a nonverbal phoneme deletion task administered in a dynamic assessment format with performance on measures of phoneme deletion, word-level reading, and speech sound production that required verbal responses for school-age children with speech sound disorders (SSDs).…

Computer-assisted instruction to prevent early reading difficulties in students at risk for dyslexia: Outcomes from two instructional approaches.

PubMed

Torgesen, Joseph K; Wagner, Richard K; Rashotte, Carol A; Herron, Jeannine; Lindamood, Patricia

2010-06-01

The relative effectiveness of two computer-assisted instructional programs designed to provide instruction and practice in foundational reading skills was examined. First-grade students at risk for reading disabilities received approximately 80 h of small-group instruction in four 50-min sessions per week from October through May. Approximately half of the instruction was delivered by specially trained teachers to prepare students for their work on the computer, and half was delivered by the computer programs. At the end of first grade, there were no differences in student reading performance between students assigned to the different intervention conditions, but the combined-intervention students performed significantly better than control students who had been exposed to their school's normal reading program. Significant differences were obtained for phonemic awareness, phonemic decoding, reading accuracy, rapid automatic naming, and reading comprehension. A follow-up test at the end of second grade showed a similar pattern of differences, although only differences in phonemic awareness, phonemic decoding, and rapid naming remained statistically reliable.

Pinyin and English Invented Spelling in Chinese-Speaking Students Who Speak English as a Second Language.

PubMed

Ding, Yi; Liu, Ru-De; McBride, Catherine A; Fan, Chung-Hau; Xu, Le; Wang, Jia

2018-05-07

This study examined pinyin (the official phonetic system that transcribes the lexical tones and pronunciation of Chinese characters) invented spelling and English invented spelling in 72 Mandarin-speaking 6th graders who learned English as their second language. The pinyin invented spelling task measured segmental-level awareness including syllable and phoneme awareness, and suprasegmental-level awareness including lexical tones and tone sandhi in Chinese Mandarin. The English invented spelling task manipulated segmental-level awareness including syllable awareness and phoneme awareness, and suprasegmental-level awareness including word stress. This pinyin task outperformed a traditional phonological awareness task that only measured segmental-level awareness and may have optimal utility to measure unique phonological and linguistic features in Chinese reading. The pinyin invented spelling uniquely explained variance in Chinese conventional spelling and word reading in both languages. The English invented spelling uniquely explained variance in conventional spelling and word reading in both languages. Our findings appear to support the role of phonological activation in Chinese reading. Our experimental linguistic manipulations altered the phonological awareness item difficulties.

Nursery Rhyme Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harper, Laurie J.

2011-01-01

Phonological awareness is an important precursor in learning to read. This awareness of phonemes fosters a child's ability to hear and blend sounds, encode and decode words, and to spell phonetically. This quantitative study assessed pre-K children's existing Euro-American nursery rhyme knowledge and phonological awareness literacy, provided…

Using a Multimodal Approach to Facilitate Articulation, Phonemic Awareness, and Literacy in Young Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pieretti, Robert A.; Kaul, Sandra D.; Zarchy, Razi M.; O'Hanlon, Laureen M.

2015-01-01

The primary focus of this research study was to examine the benefit of a using a multimodal approach to speech sound correction with preschool children. The approach uses the auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic modalities and includes a unique, interactive visual focus that attempts to provide a visual representation of a phonemic category. The…

Kindergarten Teachers' Perspective on Guided Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carrasco, Mary E.

2016-01-01

Within a Southwestern school system, deficits in early literacy skills exist as is illustrated by kindergarten students not meeting the requirements on the Phonological Awareness and Phonics Inventory (PAPI). To address this deficit in early literacy skills, the school system instituted the use of the Guided Reading Approach (GR); however, it was…

A Program Evaluation of a Literacy Initiative for Students with Moderate to Severe Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De La Cruz, Carrie F.

2009-01-01

Recently the National Reading Panel concluded that systematic and direct instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension that is informed by ongoing assessments of student progress results in positive student achievement (NICHHD, 2002). For students with moderate to severe disabilities and students with…

Differences in the Predictors of Reading Comprehension in First Graders from Low Socio-Economic Status Families with Either Good or Poor Decoding Skills

PubMed Central

Gentaz, Edouard; Sprenger-Charolles, Liliane; Theurel, Anne

2015-01-01

Based on the assumption that good decoding skills constitute a bootstrapping mechanism for reading comprehension, the present study investigated the relative contribution of the former skill to the latter compared to that of three other predictors of reading comprehension (listening comprehension, vocabulary and phonemic awareness) in 392 French-speaking first graders from low SES families. This large sample was split into three groups according to their level of decoding skills assessed by pseudoword reading. Using a cutoff of 1 SD above or below the mean of the entire population, there were 63 good decoders, 267 average decoders and 62 poor decoders. 58% of the variance in reading comprehension was explained by our four predictors, with decoding skills proving to be the best predictor (12.1%, 7.3% for listening comprehension, 4.6% for vocabulary and 3.3% for phonemic awareness). Interaction between group versus decoding skills, listening comprehension and phonemic awareness accounted for significant additional variance (3.6%, 1.1% and 1.0%, respectively). The effects on reading comprehension of decoding skills and phonemic awareness were higher in poor and average decoders than in good decoders whereas listening comprehension accounted for more variance in good and average decoders than in poor decoders. Furthermore, the percentage of children with impaired reading comprehension skills was higher in the group of poor decoders (55%) than in the two other groups (average decoders: 7%; good decoders: 0%) and only 6 children (1.5%) had impaired reading comprehension skills with unimpaired decoding skills, listening comprehension or vocabulary. These results challenge the outcomes of studies on “poor comprehenders” by showing that, at least in first grade, poor reading comprehension is strongly linked to the level of decoding skills. PMID:25793519

Differences in the predictors of reading comprehension in first graders from low socio-economic status families with either good or poor decoding skills.

PubMed

Gentaz, Edouard; Sprenger-Charolles, Liliane; Theurel, Anne

2015-01-01

Based on the assumption that good decoding skills constitute a bootstrapping mechanism for reading comprehension, the present study investigated the relative contribution of the former skill to the latter compared to that of three other predictors of reading comprehension (listening comprehension, vocabulary and phonemic awareness) in 392 French-speaking first graders from low SES families. This large sample was split into three groups according to their level of decoding skills assessed by pseudoword reading. Using a cutoff of 1 SD above or below the mean of the entire population, there were 63 good decoders, 267 average decoders and 62 poor decoders. 58% of the variance in reading comprehension was explained by our four predictors, with decoding skills proving to be the best predictor (12.1%, 7.3% for listening comprehension, 4.6% for vocabulary and 3.3% for phonemic awareness). Interaction between group versus decoding skills, listening comprehension and phonemic awareness accounted for significant additional variance (3.6%, 1.1% and 1.0%, respectively). The effects on reading comprehension of decoding skills and phonemic awareness were higher in poor and average decoders than in good decoders whereas listening comprehension accounted for more variance in good and average decoders than in poor decoders. Furthermore, the percentage of children with impaired reading comprehension skills was higher in the group of poor decoders (55%) than in the two other groups (average decoders: 7%; good decoders: 0%) and only 6 children (1.5%) had impaired reading comprehension skills with unimpaired decoding skills, listening comprehension or vocabulary. These results challenge the outcomes of studies on "poor comprehenders" by showing that, at least in first grade, poor reading comprehension is strongly linked to the level of decoding skills.

Enhancing Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge in Preschool Children with Down Syndrome

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Bysterveldt, Anne K.; Gillon, Gail T.; Moran, Catherine

2006-01-01

This study investigated the effectiveness of a phonological awareness intervention for 4-year-old children with Down syndrome. Seven children with Down syndrome who attended an early intervention centre participated in the intervention. Their performance on measures of phonological awareness (initial phoneme identity), letter name and sound…

Metalinguistic Contributions to Reading and Spelling in Second and Third Grade Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Apel, Kenn; Wilson-Fowler, Elizabeth B.; Brimo, Danielle; Perrin, Nancy A.

2012-01-01

Minimal research has been conducted on the simultaneous influence of multiple metalinguistic, linguistic, and processing skills that may impact literacy development in children who are in the process of learning to read and write. In this study, we assessed the phonemic awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, receptive…

A Comparison of Two Phonological Awareness Techniques between Samples of Preschool Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maslanka, Phyllis; Joseph, Laurice M.

2002-01-01

Examines the differential effects of sound boxes and sound sort phonological awareness instructional techniques on preschoolers' phonological awareness performance. Finds that children in the sound box group significantly outperformed children in the sound sort group on isolating medial sounds and segmenting phonemes. Reveals that preschool…

Pre-Service Teachers' Knowledge of Language Concepts: Relationships to Field Experiences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tetley, Deborah; Jones, Caroline

2014-01-01

Acquisition of language concepts by pre-service teachers (PSTs) is likely influenced by university coursework and field experiences, but little research has examined how. Knowledge of phonics and phonological awareness and confidence to teach reading were surveyed among primary PSTs at one New South Wales university, most in second year following…

Effective Word Reading Instruction: What Does the Evidence Tell Us?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Henbest, Victoria S.; Apel, Kenn

2017-01-01

This article is a report of recent evidence on methods for teaching young and struggling readers to read words. Specifically, evidence comparing synthetic and analytic phonics instruction was reviewed as well as the benefit of instruction in encoding and morphological awareness. The evidence reviewed suggests that instruction in synthetic and…

Effective Strategies Used to Increase Early Reading Skills for Students in Third Grade

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jones, LaQuanta

2013-01-01

Reading research indicates a student's academic achievement is connected to his or her reading ability (Tindall & Nisbet, 2010). Children do not have sufficient reading skills because they lack the literacy skills necessary to be successful readers. These fundamental areas include phonics, reading comprehension, fluency, alphabetic awareness,…

What Is the Influence of Morphological Knowledge in the Early Stages of Reading Acquisition Among Low SES Children? A Graphical Modeling Approach

PubMed Central

Colé, Pascale; Cavalli, Eddy; Duncan, Lynne G.; Theurel, Anne; Gentaz, Edouard; Sprenger-Charolles, Liliane; El-Ahmadi, Abdessadek

2018-01-01

Children from low-SES families are known to show delays in aspects of language development which underpin reading acquisition such as vocabulary and listening comprehension. Research on the development of morphological skills in this group is scarce, and no studies exist in French. The present study investigated the involvement of morphological knowledge in the very early stages of reading acquisition (decoding), before reading comprehension can be reliably assessed. We assessed listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phoneme awareness, morphological awareness as well as decoding, word reading and non-verbal IQ in 703 French first-graders from low-SES families after 3 months of formal schooling (November). Awareness of derivational morphology was assessed using three oral tasks: Relationship Judgment (e.g., do these words belong to the same family or not? heat-heater … ham-hammer); Lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who runs is a …? (runner)]; and Non-lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who lums is a…? (lummer)]. The tasks differ on implicit/explicit demands and also tap different kinds of morphological knowledge. The Judgement task measures the phonological and semantic properties of the morphological relationship and the Sentence Completion tasks measure knowledge of morphological production rules. Data were processed using a graphical modeling approach which offers key information about how skills known to be involved in learning to read are organized in memory. This modeling approach was therefore useful in revealing a potential network which expresses the conditional dependence structure between skills, after which recursive structural equation modeling was applied to test specific hypotheses. Six main conclusions can be drawn from these analyses about low SES reading acquisition: (1) listening comprehension is at the heart of the reading acquisition process; (2) word reading depends directly on phonemic awareness and indirectly on listening comprehension; (3) decoding depends on word reading; (4) Morphological awareness and vocabulary have an indirect influence on word reading via both listening comprehension and phoneme awareness; (5) the components of morphological awareness assessed by our tasks have independent relationships with listening comprehension; and (6) neither phonemic nor morphological awareness influence vocabulary directly. The implications of these results with regard to early reading acquisition among low SES groups are discussed. PMID:29725313

What Is the Influence of Morphological Knowledge in the Early Stages of Reading Acquisition Among Low SES Children? A Graphical Modeling Approach.

PubMed

Colé, Pascale; Cavalli, Eddy; Duncan, Lynne G; Theurel, Anne; Gentaz, Edouard; Sprenger-Charolles, Liliane; El-Ahmadi, Abdessadek

2018-01-01

Children from low-SES families are known to show delays in aspects of language development which underpin reading acquisition such as vocabulary and listening comprehension. Research on the development of morphological skills in this group is scarce, and no studies exist in French. The present study investigated the involvement of morphological knowledge in the very early stages of reading acquisition (decoding), before reading comprehension can be reliably assessed. We assessed listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phoneme awareness, morphological awareness as well as decoding, word reading and non-verbal IQ in 703 French first-graders from low-SES families after 3 months of formal schooling (November). Awareness of derivational morphology was assessed using three oral tasks: Relationship Judgment (e.g., do these words belong to the same family or not? heat-heater … ham-hammer); Lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who runs is a …? (runner)]; and Non-lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who lums is a…? (lummer)]. The tasks differ on implicit/explicit demands and also tap different kinds of morphological knowledge. The Judgement task measures the phonological and semantic properties of the morphological relationship and the Sentence Completion tasks measure knowledge of morphological production rules. Data were processed using a graphical modeling approach which offers key information about how skills known to be involved in learning to read are organized in memory. This modeling approach was therefore useful in revealing a potential network which expresses the conditional dependence structure between skills, after which recursive structural equation modeling was applied to test specific hypotheses. Six main conclusions can be drawn from these analyses about low SES reading acquisition: (1) listening comprehension is at the heart of the reading acquisition process; (2) word reading depends directly on phonemic awareness and indirectly on listening comprehension; (3) decoding depends on word reading; (4) Morphological awareness and vocabulary have an indirect influence on word reading via both listening comprehension and phoneme awareness; (5) the components of morphological awareness assessed by our tasks have independent relationships with listening comprehension; and (6) neither phonemic nor morphological awareness influence vocabulary directly. The implications of these results with regard to early reading acquisition among low SES groups are discussed.

Phonological Awareness: Explicit Instruction for Young Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Elizabeth M.; Lederberg, Amy R.; Easterbrooks, Susan R.

2013-01-01

The goal of this study was to explore the development of spoken phonological awareness for deaf and hard-of-hearing children (DHH) with functional hearing (i.e., the ability to access spoken language through hearing). Teachers explicitly taught five preschoolers the phonological awareness skills of syllable segmentation, initial phoneme isolation,…

Tongue corticospinal modulation during attended verbal stimuli: priming and coarticulation effects.

PubMed

D'Ausilio, Alessandro; Jarmolowska, Joanna; Busan, Pierpaolo; Bufalari, Ilaria; Craighero, Laila

2011-11-01

Humans perceive continuous speech through interruptions or brief noise bursts cancelling entire phonemes. This robust phenomenon has been classically associated with mechanisms of perceptual restoration. In parallel, recent experimental evidence suggests that the motor system may actively participate in speech perception, even contributing to phoneme discrimination. In the present study we intended to verify if the motor system has a specific role in speech perceptual restoration as well. To this aim we recorded tongue corticospinal excitability during phoneme expectation induced by contextual information. Results showed that phoneme expectation determines an involvement of the individual's motor system specifically implicated in the production of the attended phoneme, exactly as it happens during actual listening of that phoneme, suggesting the presence of a speech imagery-like process. Very interestingly, this motoric phoneme expectation is also modulated by subtle coarticulation cues of which the listener is not consciously aware. Present data indicate that the rehearsal of a specific phoneme requires the contribution of the motor system exactly as it happens during the rehearsal of actions executed by the limbs, and that this process is abolished when an incongruent phonemic cue is presented, as similarly occurs during observation of anomalous hand actions. We propose that altogether these effects indicate that during speech listening an attentional-like mechanism driven by the motor system, based on a feed-forward anticipatory mechanism constantly verifying incoming information, is working allowing perceptual restoration. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Exploring Assessment Demands and Task Supports in Early Childhood Phonological Awareness Assessments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cassano, Christina M.; Steiner, Lilly

2016-01-01

Phonological awareness is assessed in various ways in both research studies and early childhood classrooms. The measures used to assess phonological awareness are related closely, although they differ in the linguistic unit used (e.g., word, syllable, onset-rime, or phoneme), the position of the linguistic unit (e.g., initial, medial, final), the…

Sounds Like Fun: Activities for Developing Phonological Awareness, Revised Edition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spector, Cecile Cyrul

2009-01-01

Kids love jokes--and teachers and SLPs love fast and easy ways to improve students' phonological awareness. That's why every elementary and middle-school SLP and educator needs this playful, effective activity book, packed with jokes and riddles that increase students' awareness of the phonemes that make up words. The perfect way to avoid "drill…

Orthographic Influences, Vocabulary Development, and Phonological Awareness in Deaf Children Who Use Cochlear Implants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

James, Deborah; Rajput, Kaukab; Brinton, Julie; Goswami, Usha

2009-01-01

In the current study, we explore the influence of orthographic knowledge on phonological awareness in children with cochlear implants and compare developmental associations to those found for hearing children matched for word reading level or chronological age. We show an influence of orthographic knowledge on syllable and phoneme awareness in…

Linking Music Learning to Reading Instruction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hansen, Dee; Bernstorf, Elaine

2002-01-01

Focuses on the connections between music reading and text reading to explore the influences of music education on children's reading skills. Addresses topics, such as phonological and phonemic awareness, sight identification, orthographic awareness, and fluency. Discusses research that addresses the influence of music on reading. (CMK)

Auditory processing and phonological awareness skills of five-year-old children with and without musical experience.

PubMed

Escalda, Júlia; Lemos, Stela Maris Aguiar; França, Cecília Cavalieri

2011-09-01

To investigate the relations between musical experience, auditory processing and phonological awareness of groups of 5-year-old children with and without musical experience. Participants were 56 5-year-old subjects of both genders, 26 in the Study Group, consisting of children with musical experience, and 30 in the Control Group, consisting of children without musical experience. All participants were assessed with the Simplified Auditory Processing Assessment and Phonological Awareness Test and the data was statistically analyzed. There was a statistically significant difference between the results of the sequential memory test for verbal and non-verbal sounds with four stimuli, phonological awareness tasks of rhyme recognition, phonemic synthesis and phonemic deletion. Analysis of multiple binary logistic regression showed that, with exception of the sequential verbal memory with four syllables, the observed difference in subjects' performance was associated with their musical experience. Musical experience improves auditory and metalinguistic abilities of 5-year-old children.

Impact of orthographic transparency on typical and atypical reading development: evidence in French-Spanish bilingual children.

PubMed

Lallier, Marie; Valdois, Sylviane; Lassus-Sangosse, Delphine; Prado, Chloé; Kandel, Sonia

2014-05-01

The present study aimed to quantify cross-linguistic modulations of the contribution of phonemic awareness skills and visual attention span (VA Span) skills (number of visual elements that can be processed simultaneously) to reading speed and accuracy in 18 Spanish-French balanced bilingual children with and without developmental dyslexia. The children were administered two similar reading batteries in French and Spanish. The deficits of the dyslexic children in reading accuracy were mainly visible in their opaque orthography (French) whereas difficulties indexed by reading speed were observed in both their opaque and transparent orthographies. Dyslexic children did not exhibit any phonemic awareness problems in French or in Spanish, but showed poor VA Span skills compared to their control peers. VA span skills correlated with reading accuracy and speed measures in both Spanish and French, whereas phonemic awareness correlated with reading accuracy only. Overall, the present results show that the VA Span is tightly related to reading speed regardless of orthographic transparency, and that it accounts for differences in reading performance between good and poor readers across languages. The present findings further suggest that VA Span skills may play a particularly important role in building-up specific word knowledge which is critical for lexical reading strategies. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cross-linguistic interactions influence reading development in bilinguals: a comparison between early balanced French-Basque and Spanish-Basque bilingual children.

PubMed

Lallier, Marie; Acha, Joana; Carreiras, Manuel

2016-01-01

This study investigates whether orthographic consistency and transparency of languages have an impact on the development of reading strategies and reading sub-skills (i.e. phonemic awareness and visual attention span) in bilingual children. We evaluated 21 French (opaque)-Basque (transparent) bilingual children and 21 Spanish (transparent)-Basque (transparent) bilingual children at Grade 2, and 16 additional children of each group at Grade 5. All of them were assessed in their common language (i.e. Basque) on tasks measuring word and pseudoword reading, phonemic awareness and visual attention span skills. The Spanish speaking groups showed better Basque pseudoword reading and better phonemic awareness abilities than their French speaking peers, but only in the most difficult conditions of the tasks. However, on the visual attention span task, the French-Basque bilinguals showed the most efficient visual processing strategies to perform the task. Therefore, learning to read in an additional language affected differently Basque literacy skills, depending on whether this additional orthography was opaque (e.g. French) or transparent (e.g. Spanish). Moreover, we showed that the most noteworthy effects of Spanish and French orthographic transparency on Basque performance were related to the size of the phonological and visual grain used to perform the tasks. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Modern Phonics Instruction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Groff, Patrick

Numerous reviews of the experimental research conclude that phonics is indispensable in word recognition instruction. However, there have been numerous objections to phonics teaching over the years. Some of the intolerance of phonics teaching reflects a lack of knowledge about the subject. Critics suggest that phonics hinders children's learning…

Stepping Stones to Literacy. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2007

2007-01-01

Stepping Stones to Literacy (SSL) is a supplemental curriculum designed to promote listening, print conventions, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and serial processing/rapid naming (quickly naming familiar visual symbols and stimuli such as letters or colors). The program targets kindergarten and older preschool students considered to…

Phonics and the Teaching of Reading.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hughes, John M.

Suggestions for various activities, games, and materials for teaching phonics are presented in this handbook for teachers and teachers in training. The chapters and materials covered include: (1) "Why Phonics," which presents the rationale for teaching phonics; (2) "A Suggested Order for Teaching Phonics," which discusses the order of difficulty…

The Contribution of Phonological and Morphological Awareness in Chinese-English Bilingual Reading Acquisition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lin, Candise Y.; Cheng, Chenxi; Wang, Min

2018-01-01

The current study examined the contribution of cross-language phonological and morphological awareness to reading acquisition in bilingual children. Participants were 140 children (M[subscript age] = 8.26 years) between Grades 1-4 who learned Chinese as their first language and English as their second language. Awareness of phoneme, onset-rime,…

Phonics Is Phonics Is Phonics--Or Is It?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCulloch, Myrna T.

For 60 years, confusion and misinformation have reigned supreme whenever the subject of teaching phonics comes up for discussion. The paper considers various phonics programs, both old and new, and appraises their effectiveness. It also discusses works on phonetics by some well-known researchers and experts in reading, among them Frank Smith,…

Phonic Skills and Their Measurement.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Congdon, Peter J.

Designed as a practical guide for teachers, this book briefly reviews and discusses various aspects of phonics. Phonics is defined, and the part phonics has played in the teaching of reading in the past is considered. The use of phonics in teaching reading at the present is examined in relation to currently available research on various approaches…

Word and Person Effects on Decoding Accuracy: A New Look at an Old Question

PubMed Central

Gilbert, Jennifer K.; Compton, Donald L.; Kearns, Devin M.

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to extend the literature on decoding by bringing together two lines of research, namely person and word factors that affect decoding, using a crossed random-effects model. The sample was comprised of 196 English-speaking grade 1 students. A researcher-developed pseudoword list was used as the primary outcome measure. Because grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) knowledge was treated as person and word specific, we are able to conclude that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a student to know all GPCs in a word before accurately decoding the word. And controlling for word-specific GPC knowledge, students with lower phonemic awareness and slower rapid naming skill have lower predicted probabilities of correct decoding than counterparts with superior skills. By assessing a person-by-word interaction, we found that students with lower phonemic awareness have more difficulty applying knowledge of complex vowel graphemes compared to complex consonant graphemes when decoding unfamiliar words. Implications of the methodology and results are discussed in light of future research. PMID:21743750

Dutch home-based pre-reading intervention with children at familial risk of dyslexia.

PubMed

van Otterloo, Sandra G; van der Leij, Aryan

2009-12-01

Children (5 and 6 years old, n = 30) at familial risk of dyslexia received a home-based intervention that focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in the year prior to formal reading instruction. The children were compared to a no-training at-risk control group (n = 27), which was selected a year earlier. After training, we found a small effect on a composite score of phoneme awareness (d = 0.29) and a large effect on receptive letter knowledge (d = 0.88). In first grade, however, this did not result in beneficial effects for the experimental group in word reading and spelling. Results are compared to three former intervention studies in The Netherlands and comparable studies from Denmark and Australia.

Pinyin Invented Spelling in Mandarin Chinese-Speaking Children with and without Reading Difficulties

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ding, Yi; Liu, Ru-De; McBride, Catherine; Zhang, Dake

2015-01-01

This study examined analytical pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching pronunciation and lexical tones of Chinese characters) skills in 54 Mandarin-speaking fourth graders by using an invented spelling instrument that tapped into syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, lexical tones, and tone sandhi in Chinese. Pinyin invented spelling…

The Acquisition of Phoneme Awareness in Children Learning the Hiragana Syllabary

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fletcher-Flinn, Claire M.; Thompson, G. Brian; Yamada, Megumi; Naka, Makiko

2011-01-01

In research on the acquisition of reading, there have been some cross-orthographic comparisons between alphabetic scripts and the hiragana syllabic script. One of the theoretical motives for these comparisons is the hypothesis that phonological awareness is related to the size of the phonological unit mapped by the orthography, with phoneme…

A Multimedia English Learning System Using HMMs to Improve Phonemic Awareness for English Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lai, Yen-Shou; Tsai, Hung-Hsu; Yu, Pao-Ta

2009-01-01

This paper proposes a multimedia English learning (MEL) system, based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and mastery theory strategy, for teaching students with the aim of enhancing their English phonetic awareness and pronunciation. It can analyze phonetic structures, identify and capture pronunciation errors to provide students with targeted advice…

Statistical learning in reading: variability in irrelevant letters helps children learn phonics skills.

PubMed

Apfelbaum, Keith S; Hazeltine, Eliot; McMurray, Bob

2013-07-01

Early reading abilities are widely considered to derive in part from statistical learning of regularities between letters and sounds. Although there is substantial evidence from laboratory work to support this, how it occurs in the classroom setting has not been extensively explored; there are few investigations of how statistics among letters and sounds influence how children actually learn to read or what principles of statistical learning may improve learning. We examined 2 conflicting principles that may apply to learning grapheme-phoneme-correspondence (GPC) regularities for vowels: (a) variability in irrelevant units may help children derive invariant relationships and (b) similarity between words may force children to use a deeper analysis of lexical structure. We trained 224 first-grade students on a small set of GPC regularities for vowels, embedded in words with either high or low consonant similarity, and tested their generalization to novel tasks and words. Variability offered a consistent benefit over similarity for trained and new words in both trained and new tasks.

Exploring Differential Effects Across Two Decoding Treatments on Item-Level Transfer in Children with Significant Word Reading Difficulties: A New Approach for Testing Intervention Elements.

PubMed

Steacy, Laura M; Elleman, Amy M; Lovett, Maureen W; Compton, Donald L

2016-01-01

In English, gains in decoding skill do not map directly onto increases in word reading. However, beyond the Self-Teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995), little is known about the transfer of decoding skills to word reading. In this study, we offer a new approach to testing specific decoding elements on transfer to word reading. To illustrate, we modeled word-reading gains among children with reading disability (RD) enrolled in Phonological and Strategy Training (PHAST) or Phonics for Reading (PFR). Conditions differed in sublexical training with PHAST stressing multi-level connections and PFR emphasizing simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Thirty-seven children with RD, 3 rd - 6 th grade, were randomly assigned 60 lessons of PHAST or PFR. Crossed random-effects models allowed us to identify specific intervention elements that differentially impacted word-reading performance at posttest, with children in PHAST better able to read words with variant vowel pronunciations. Results suggest that sublexical emphasis influences transfer gains to word reading.

The relationship between maternal education and the neural substrates of phoneme perception in children: Interactions between socioeconomic status and proficiency level.

PubMed

Conant, Lisa L; Liebenthal, Einat; Desai, Anjali; Binder, Jeffrey R

2017-08-01

Relationships between maternal education (ME) and both behavioral performances and brain activation during the discrimination of phonemic and nonphonemic sounds were examined using fMRI in children with different levels of phoneme categorization proficiency (CP). Significant relationships were found between ME and intellectual functioning and vocabulary, with a trend for phonological awareness. A significant interaction between CP and ME was seen for nonverbal reasoning abilities. In addition, fMRI analyses revealed a significant interaction between CP and ME for phonemic discrimination in left prefrontal cortex. Thus, ME was associated with differential patterns of both neuropsychological performance and brain activation contingent on the level of CP. These results highlight the importance of examining SES effects at different proficiency levels. The pattern of results may suggest the presence of neurobiological differences in the children with low CP that affect the nature of relationships with ME. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Early Bimodal Stimulation Benefits Language Acquisition for Children With Cochlear Implants.

PubMed

Moberly, Aaron C; Lowenstein, Joanna H; Nittrouer, Susan

2016-01-01

Adding a low-frequency acoustic signal to the cochlear implant (CI) signal (i.e., bimodal stimulation) for a period of time early in life improves language acquisition. Children must acquire sensitivity to the phonemic units of language to develop most language-related skills, including expressive vocabulary, working memory, and reading. Acquiring sensitivity to phonemic structure depends largely on having refined spectral (frequency) representations available in the signal, which does not happen with CIs alone. Combining the low-frequency acoustic signal available through hearing aids with the CI signal can enhance signal quality. A period with this bimodal stimulation has been shown to improve language skills in very young children. This study examined whether these benefits persist into childhood. Data were examined for 48 children with CIs implanted under age 3 years, participating in a longitudinal study. All children wore hearing aids before receiving a CI, but upon receiving a first CI, 24 children had at least 1 year of bimodal stimulation (Bimodal group), and 24 children had only electric stimulation subsequent to implantation (CI-only group). Measures of phonemic awareness were obtained at second and fourth grades, along with measures of expressive vocabulary, working memory, and reading. Children in the Bimodal group generally performed better on measures of phonemic awareness, and that advantage was reflected in other language measures. Having even a brief period of time early in life with combined electric-acoustic input provides benefits to language learning into childhood, likely because of the enhancement in spectral representations provided.

Phonological awareness: one key to the reading proficiency of deaf children.

PubMed

Nielsen, Diane Corcoran; Luetke-Stahlman, Barbara

2002-07-01

A case is made for the importance of children's development of phonological awareness--whether they are hearing or deaf--if they are to reach their potential as readers. Relevant terms are defined (i.e., phonological awareness, phonological processes, and phonics) to assist the reader with the research review, which covers (a) the typical stages in the acquisition of phonological awareness and (b) phonological awareness and deafness. Suggestions for phonological awareness assessment are offered, along with the recommendation that the use of recently developed formal and informal measures of phonological awareness might facilitate the setting of goals and objectives when deaf educators or speech-language pathologists are evaluating the skills of deaf students and planning instruction for these students. Such tools yield information about skills that have been shown to correlate with literacy attainment and that are not commonly addressed by deaf educators or speech-language pathologists serving deaf students. Finally, research concerning the facilitation of phonological awareness and its application is explained.

The Relationship between Auditory Temporal Processing, Phonemic Awareness, and Reading Disability.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bretherton, Lesley; Holmes, V. M.

2003-01-01

Investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in 8- to 12-year-olds with a reading disability, placed in groups based on performance on Tallal's tone-order judgment task. Found that a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on order processing of speech sounds, to…

Phonological Awareness, Vocabulary, and Word Reading in Children Who Use Cochlear Implants: Does Age of Implantation Explain Individual Variability in Performance Outcomes and Growth?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

James, Deborah; Rajput, Kaukab; Brinton, Julie; Goswami, Usha

2008-01-01

The phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and word reading abilities of 19 children with cochlear implants (CI) were assessed. Nine children had an implant early (between 2 and 3.6 years) and 10 had an implant later (between 5 and 7 years). Participants were tested twice over a 12-month period on syllable, rhyme, and phoneme awareness (see…

Sound It Out! Phonics in a Comprehensive Reading System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Savage, John

2006-01-01

Rather than treating phonics as an end in itself, this brief text shows how phonics fits into the overall process of a child's learning to read. It helps students understand how phonics can be integrated successfully into an effective classroom reading program. While it includes a wealth of suggestions for practical classroom applications, the…

Pre-service teachers' knowledge of phonemic awareness: relationship to perceived knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs, and exposure to a multimedia-enhanced lecture.

PubMed

Martinussen, Rhonda; Ferrari, Julia; Aitken, Madison; Willows, Dale

2015-10-01

This study examined the relations among perceived and actual knowledge of phonemic awareness (PA), exposure to PA instruction during practicum, and self-efficacy for teaching PA in a sample of 54 teacher candidates (TCs) enrolled in a 1-year Bachelor of Education program in a Canadian university. It also assessed the effects of a brief multimedia-enhanced lecture on TCs' actual knowledge of PA and efficacy ratings. Prior to the lecture, teacher candidates' scores on the PA assessment were relatively low with a mean percentage correct of 56.3%. Actual knowledge was not significantly correlated with perceived knowledge or self-efficacy ratings. Perceived knowledge was significantly and positively correlated with efficacy ratings and students' rating of their exposure to PA instruction during their practicum experience. A path analysis revealed that the relationship between exposure to PA instruction and self-efficacy beliefs was mediated by perceived knowledge controlling for actual knowledge and general prior experience working with young children. Analyses also revealed that TCs made significant gains in self-efficacy as well as actual knowledge when re-assessed after the lecture with a mean post-lecture score of 71.4%. Written feedback from the TCs indicated that the digital video clips included in the lecture provided clarity regarding the type of instructional practices that teachers could use to support phonemic awareness development in children. Implications for practice and future research on teacher preparation are discussed.

Vowel Diphthongs. Fun with Phonics! Book 10. Grades 1-2.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Daniel, Claire

This book provides hands-on activities for grades 1-2 that make phonics instruction easy and fun for teachers and children in the classroom. The book offers methods for practice, reinforcement, and assessment of phonics skills. A poem is used to introduce the phonics element of this book, vowel diphthongs. The poem is duplicated so children can…

Phonic Analysis Training and Beginning Reading Skills.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rosner, Jerome

The purposes of the study were to determine whether phonic analysis training could be used to prepare children to be successful on the Auditory Analysis Test (AAT) of phonic skills and to then relate phonic knowledge to reading performance. Subjects were 40 first graders in suburban Pittsburgh who had attended kindergarten together. A group of 16…

Comparing the Effects of Augmented Reality Phonics and Scripted Phonics Approaches on Achievement of At-Risk Kindergarten Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ladd, Melissa

2016-01-01

This study strived to determine the effectiveness of the AR phonics program relative to the effectiveness of the scripted phonics program for developing the letter identification, sound verbalization, and blending abilities of kindergarten students considered at-risk based on state assessments. The researcher was interested in pretest and posttest…

Sight Word and Phonics Training in Children with Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McArthur, Genevieve; Castles, Anne; Kohnen, Saskia; Larsen, Linda; Jones, Kristy; Anandakumar, Thushara; Banales, Erin

2015-01-01

The aims of this study were to (a) compare sight word training and phonics training in children with dyslexia, and (b) determine if different orders of sight word and phonics training have different effects on the reading skills of children with dyslexia. One group of children (n = 36) did 8 weeks of phonics training (reading via grapheme-phoneme…

Integration of Phonics into Elementary Reading Programs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bast, Jenna M.

2013-01-01

Understanding phonics is an important part of a young student's ability in learning how to read. The problem is that there is no set system that teachers follow in teaching phonics skills. The purpose of this study is to discover the ways that first grade teachers teach phonics to their students to help promote students success in reading. The…

Phonemic Awareness Development in 2.5- and 3.5-Year-Old Children: An Examination of Emergent, Receptive, Knowledge and Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kenner, Brandi Biscoe; Terry, Nicole Patton; Friehling, Arielle H.; Namy, Laura L.

2017-01-01

The National Institutes of Health has deemed illiteracy a national health crisis based on reading proficiency rates among American children. In 2002, the National Early Literacy Panel identified six pre-reading skills that are most crucial precursors to reading mastery and predict future reading outcomes. Of those skills, phonological awareness,…

The Contribution of L1 Phonemic Awareness into L2 Reading: The Case of Arab EFL Readers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alshaboul, Yousef; Asassfeh, Sahail; Alshboul, Sabri; Alodwan, Talal

2014-01-01

Cross-language transfer is the extent, if any, to which phonological awareness in L1 facilitates learning to read in L2. This has been an area of investigation wherein researchers looked into the orthographic and phonological component processing skills L2 learners develop and utilize to facilitate word recognition. Given the difference between…

Learning to Read Setswana and English: Cross-Language Transference of Letter Knowledge, Phonological Awareness and Word Reading Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lekgoko, Olemme; Winskel, Heather

2008-01-01

The current study investigates how beginner readers learn to read Setswana and English, and whether there is cross-language transference of skills between these two languages. Letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and reading of words and pseudowords in both Setswana and English were assessed in 36 Grade 2 children. A complex pattern emerged.…

Ants, Apples and the ABCs: The Use of Commercial Phonics Programmes in Prior-to-School Children's Services

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campbell, Stacey; Torr, Jane; Cologon, Kathy

2012-01-01

Commercial phonics programmes (e.g. Jolly Phonics and Letterland) are becoming widely used in the early years of school. These programmes claim to use a systematic explicit approach, considered as the preferred method of phonics instruction for teaching alphabetic code-breaking skills in Australia and the UK in the first years of school…

Exploration of the Consortium on Reading Excellence Phonics Survey: An Instrument for Assessing Primary-Grade Students' Phonics Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reutzel, D. Ray; Brandt, Lorilynn; Fawson, Parker C.; Jones, Cindy D.

2014-01-01

This article examines the Consortium on Reading Excellence-Phonics Survey (CORE-PS), an informal, inexpensive, and widely disseminated assessment tool that is used to determine primary-grade students' knowledge of and abilities to apply key alphabetic and phonics understandings to decode a mix of real and pseudo-words. Evidence is reported of the…

Construct and Predictive Validity of the Core Phonics Survey: A Diagnostic Assessment for Students with Specific Learning Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Park, Yujeong; Benedict, Amber E.; Brownell, Mary T.

2014-01-01

The factor structure of the CORE Phonics Survey was analyzed using a sample of 165 students in upper elementary school with specific learning disabilities. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to identify the hypothesized constructs of the CORE Phonics Survey and predictive validity of the CORE Phonics Survey to predict students' success in word…

Phonological awareness and oral language proficiency in learning to read English among Chinese kindergarten children in Hong Kong.

PubMed

Yeung, Susanna S; Chan, Carol K K

2013-12-01

Learning to read is very challenging for Hong Kong children who learn English as a second language (ESL), as they must acquire two very different writing systems, beginning at the age of three. Few studies have examined the role of phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels, oral language proficiency, and L1 tone awareness in L2 English reading among Hong Kong ESL kindergarteners. This study aims to investigate L1 and L2 phonological awareness and oral language proficiency as predictors of English reading among children with Chinese as L1. One hundred and sixty-one typically developing children with a mean age of 5.16 (SD=.35) selected from seven preschools in Hong Kong. Participants were assessed for English reading, English and Chinese phonological awareness at different levels, English oral language skills, and letter naming ability. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that both oral language proficiency and phonological awareness measures significantly predicted L2 word reading, when statistically controlled for age and general intelligence. Among various phonological awareness units, L2 phonemic awareness was the best predictor of L2 word reading. Cross-language transfer was shown with L1 phonological awareness at the tone level, uniquely predicting L2 word reading. The present findings show the important role of phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme) and oral language proficiency in the course of L2 reading development in Chinese ESL learners. The significant contribution of L1 tone awareness to L2 reading suggests that phonological sensitivity is a general competence that ESL children need to acquire in early years. The findings have significant implications for understanding L2 reading development and curriculum development. © 2012 The British Psychological Society.

Phonemic awareness of English second language learners

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Background The PA skills of phonological blending and segmentation and auditory word discrimination relate directly to literacy and may be weak in English second language (EL2) learners. In South Africa, literacy skills have been found to be poor in especially EL2 learners. Objectives The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of vowel perception and production intervention on phonemic awareness (PA) and literacy skills of Setswana first language (L1) learners. These learners are English second language (EL2) learners in Grade 3. Method The present study employed a quasi-experimental, pre-test–post-test design. Results The findings of low–literacy skill levels concurred with previous investigations. However, post-test results of intervention in PA seemed to improve the literacy skills of EL2 learners. Conclusion PA skills should be a crucial part of the literacy curriculum in South Africa. PMID:28155282

Early home-based intervention in the Netherlands for children at familial risk of dyslexia.

PubMed

van Otterloo, Sandra G; van der Leij, Aryan; Henrichs, Lotte F

2009-08-01

Dutch children at higher familial risk of reading disability received a home-based intervention programme before formal reading instruction started to investigate whether this would reduce the risk of dyslexia. The experimental group (n=23) received a specific training in phoneme awareness and letter knowledge. A control group (n=25) received a non-specific training in morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. Both interventions were designed to take 10 min a day, 5 days a week for 10 weeks. Most parents were sufficiently able to work with the programme properly. At post-test the experimental group had gained more on phoneme awareness than the control group. The control group gained more on one of the morphology measures. On average, these specific training results did not lead to significant group differences in first-grade reading and spelling measures. However, fewer experimental children scored below 10th percentile on word recognition. (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Comparison of Phonemic and Phonological Awareness in Educators Working with Children Who Are d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Messier, Jane; Jackson, Carla Wood

2013-01-01

The Researchers explored the phonological awareness (PA) competency and confidence of educators working with children who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing. Performance comparisons were made between the two surveyed professional groups, teachers of the deaf (TODs; n = 58) and speech-language pathologists (SLPs; n = 51). It was found that both…

Contribution of Temporal Processing Skills to Reading Comprehension in 8-Year-Olds: Evidence for a Mediation Effect of Phonological Awareness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Malenfant, Nathalie; Grondin, Simon; Boivin, Michel; Forget-Dubois, Nadine; Robaey, Philippe; Dionne, Ginette

2012-01-01

This study tested whether the association between temporal processing (TP) and reading is mediated by phonological awareness (PA) in a normative sample of 615 eight-year-olds. TP was measured with auditory and bimodal (visual-auditory) temporal order judgment tasks and PA with a phoneme deletion task. PA partially mediated the association between…

Improving Reading and Language Arts Skills of At-Risk First Graders through Direct Instruction of Print Awareness, Phoneme Awareness, and Phonological Processing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bump, Sandra K.; Swedberg, Trina L.; Yates, Carol R.

This report describes a program to improve reading and language arts skills. The targeted population consisted of students in 2 first grade classrooms (average class size 25) from a midwestern elementary school in a predominantly white, middle to upper-middle class neighborhood. Data documenting the problem was obtained from the previous year's…

Cat in the Hat or Cat in the Cap? An Investigation of the Developmental Trajectories of Phonological Awareness for Korean Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Young-Suk

2008-01-01

This study investigated trajectories of Korean children's growth in the awareness of four phonological units--"syllable," "body," "rime" and "phoneme"--over time, by following a sample of 215 children over a period of 15 months, beginning at their first year of preschool and collecting four waves of data. Much of the existing research suggests…

A Comparison of Various Approaches to Evaluating Phonics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pikulski, John J.; Shanahan, Timothy

1980-01-01

Reviews information about three major dimensions along which phonics measures vary: (1) group v individual administration, (2) production response (say or write) v recognition response, and (3) the stimuli or materials used to evaluate phonics. (HOD)

[Intervention in dyslexic disorders: phonological awareness training].

PubMed

Etchepareborda, M C

2003-02-01

Taking into account the systems for the treatment of brain information when drawing up a work plan allows us to recreate processing routines that go from multisensory perception to motor, oral and cognitive production, which is the step prior to executive levels of thought, bottom-up and top-down processing systems. In recent years, the use of phonological methods to prevent or resolve reading disorders has become the fundamental mainstay in the treatment of dyslexia. The work is mainly based on phonological proficiency, which enables the patient to detect phonemes (input), to think about them (performance) and to use them to build words (output). Daily work with rhymes, the capacity to listen, the identification of phrases and words, and handling syllables and phonemes allows us to perform a preventive intervention that enhances the capacity to identify letters, phonological analysis and the reading of single words. We present the different therapeutic models that are most frequently employed. Fast For Word (FFW) training helps make progress in phonematic awareness and other linguistic skills, such as phonological awareness, semantics, syntax, grammar, working memory and event sequencing. With Deco-Fon, a programme for training phonological decoding, work is carried out on the auditory discrimination of pure tones, letters and consonant clusters, auditory processing speed, auditory and phonematic memory, and graphophonological processing, which is fundamental for speech, language and reading writing disorders. Hamlet is a programme based on categorisation activities for working on phonological conceptualisation. It attempts to encourage the analysis of the segments of words, syllables or phonemes, and the classification of a certain segment as belonging or not to a particular phonological or orthographical category. Therapeutic approaches in the early phases of reading are oriented towards two poles based on the basic mechanisms underlying the process of learning to read, the grapheme phoneme transformation process and global word recognition. The interventionalist strategies used at school are focused on the use of cognitive strategy techniques. The purpose of these techniques is to teach pupils practical strategies or resources aimed at overcoming specific deficiencies.

Replicability of sight word training and phonics training in poor readers: a randomised controlled trial

PubMed Central

Kohnen, S; Jones, K; Eve, P; Banales, E; Larsen, L; Castles, A

2015-01-01

Given the importance of effective treatments for children with reading impairment, paired with growing concern about the lack of scientific replication in psychological science, the aim of this study was to replicate a quasi-randomised trial of sight word and phonics training using a randomised controlled trial (RCT) design. One group of poor readers (N = 41) did 8 weeks of phonics training (i.e., phonological decoding) and then 8 weeks of sight word training (i.e., whole-word recognition). A second group did the reverse order of training. Sight word and phonics training each had a large and significant valid treatment effect on trained irregular words and word reading fluency. In addition, combined sight word and phonics training had a moderate and significant valid treatment effect on nonword reading accuracy and fluency. These findings demonstrate the reliability of both phonics and sight word training in treating poor readers in an era where the importance of scientific reliability is under close scrutiny. PMID:26019992

Teaching the Alphabet to Young Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wasik, Barbara A.

2001-01-01

Clarifies issues surrounding teaching of the alphabet to preschoolers. Considers the meaning of "teaching" and examines links between letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and learning to read. Presents suggestions for teaching the alphabet within developmentally appropriate practice guidelines, including beginning with the familiar, creating a…

Let Them Eat More Than Phonics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zimmermann, Jerry; Brown, Carolyn

2003-01-01

Uses reading-guide pyramid based on U.S. Department of Agriculture's food-guide pyramid to develop argument that new federal guidelines for scientific-based research will result in an unbalanced, phonics-rich approach to reading instruction. Argues for a balanced approach that includes comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and phonics. (PKP)

Developmental dyslexia in adults: behavioural manifestations and cognitive correlates.

PubMed

Nergård-Nilssen, Trude; Hulme, Charles

2014-08-01

This paper explores the nature of residual literacy and cognitive deficits in self-reported dyslexic Norwegian adults. The performance of 26 self-reported dyslexic adults was compared with that of a comparison group of 47 adults with no history of reading or spelling difficulties. Participants completed standardized and experimental measures tapping literacy skills, working memory, phonological awareness and rapid naming. Spelling problems were the most prominent marker of dyslexia in adults, followed by text reading fluency and nonword decoding. Working memory and phoneme awareness explained unique variance in spelling, whereas rapid automatized naming explained unique variance in reading fluency and nonword reading. The moderate to strong correlations between self-reported history, self-rating of current literacy skills and outcomes on literacy tests indicate that adults estimated their literacy skills fairly well. Results suggest that spelling impairments, more strongly than reading impairments, make adults perceive themselves as being dyslexic. A combination of three literacy and three cognitive tests predicted group membership with 90.4% accuracy. It appears that weaknesses in phoneme awareness, rapid automatized naming and working memory are strong and persistent correlates of literacy problems even in adults learning a relatively transparent orthography. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using Multisensory Phonics to Foster Reading Skills of Adolescent Delinquents

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Warnick, Kristan; Caldarella, Paul

2016-01-01

This study examined the effectiveness of a multisensory phonics-based reading remediation program for adolescent delinquents classified as poor readers living at a residential treatment center. We used a pretest--posttest control group design with random assignment. The treatment group participated in a 30-hr multisensory phonics reading…

Differing Effects of Two Synthetic Phonics Programmes on Early Reading Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shapiro, Laura R.; Solity, Jonathan

2016-01-01

Background: "Synthetic phonics" is the widely accepted approach for teaching reading in English: Children are taught to sound out the letters in a word then blend these sounds together. Aims: We compared the impact of two "synthetic phonics" programmes on early reading. Sample: Children received "Letters" and…

Phonics and Whole Language: Friends or Foes?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raven, Jennifer N.

Most educators agree that an approach balanced between phonics and whole language is the best method of teaching beginning readers. Marie Carbo (1996) discusses the importance of focusing on a balanced approach to reading, because different students have different learning styles. Children who learn best with phonics instruction have analytic and…

A Logical Letter-Sound System in Five Phonic Generalizations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gates, Louis; Yale, Ian

2011-01-01

In five phonic generalizations, this article introduces a logical system of letter-sound relationships. Ranging from 91% to 99% phonic transparency, these statements generalize a study of 16,928 words in children's literature. The r-controlled vowels aside, the analysis shows 54 basic transparent letters and letter combinations, 39 transparent…

Teaching and Testing Early Reading. Focus On

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mraz, Maryann; Kissel, Brian

2007-01-01

This issue of "Focus On" provides an overview of several key early literacy components: phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, concepts of print, oral language development, writing, family literacy, and reading aloud. Suggestions for assessing early literacy development are provided, and examples of implementation of effective early literacy…

Spelling Strategies: Take Stock of Students' Spelling Progress.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gentry, J. Richard

1998-01-01

Presents four informal assessments that elementary teachers can use to compare students' spelling progress to typical midyear benchmarks. The assessments, which target K-6 students, emphasize alphabet recognition, phonemic awareness, attitude and consciousness about spelling, and spelling growth through writing samples. The paper includes a…

Nurturing Reading Proficiency of Pupils through Phonics: Entrepreneurial Opportunities for Early Childhood Educators in Nigeria

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shoaga, Opeyemi; Akintola, Olugbenga Adeyanju; Okpor, Christiana Isiwat

2017-01-01

Nurturing reading proficiency among the Nigerian children has become pivotal to a functional and development-oriented education. The place of phonics in achieving this strategic goal seems unquestionable with attendant entrepreneurial opportunities for early childhood educators. This study therefore, investigates the influence of phonics in…

The Inclusion of Pseudowords within the Year One Phonics "Screening Check" in English Primary Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gibson, Howard; England, Jennifer

2016-01-01

The paper highlights problems surrounding the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check that has accompanied the legislative framework for synthetic phonics in English primary schools. It investigates the inclusion of pseudowords and raises questions regarding their generation and categorization, the rationale for their inclusion and the assumption that the…

Reliability and Validity of Advanced Phonics Measures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Doty, Sara J.; Hixson, Michael D.; Decker, Dawn M.; Reynolds, Jennifer L.; Drevon, Daniel D.

2015-01-01

Two studies explored the technical adequacy of various measures of advanced phonics skills. In Study 1, the advanced phonics measures consisted of pseudowords, real words, or a combination of both. Participants included 39 students in the third grade. Test-retest correlations for all measures were above 0.8 and interrater reliability was high.…

Reading in French-Speaking Adults with Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, Jennifer; Cole, Pascale; Leuwers, Christel; Casalis, Severine; Zorman, Michel; Sprenger-Charolles, Liliane

2010-01-01

This study investigated the reading and reading-related skills of 15 French-speaking adults with dyslexia, whose performance was compared with that of chronological-age controls (CA) and reading-level controls (RL). Experiment 1 assessed the efficiency of their phonological reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term…

Decoding Acquisition: A Study of First Grade Readers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hollingsworth, Sandra

To determine the factors accounting for children's growth in decoding skill, a study examined school entering characteristics--age, sex, ethnicity, and developmental abilities--and school-influenced skills and characteristics--phonemic awareness, letter-name knowledge, basal text, and place in series--of approximately 100 grade one students.…

Phonics Teaching and Learning in Whole Language Classrooms: New Evidence from Research.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dahl, Karin L.; Scharer, Patricia L.

2000-01-01

Investigates eight first-grade whole language classrooms in terms of what phonics skills and concepts were taught, where phonics instruction occurred, and how it was conducted. Shows gains in ability to decode and encode words for all students. Finds that teachers responded to individual needs of learners, and that skills were taught within the…

PHONICS WITH CONTEXT CLUES, PRIMARY LEVEL.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

GUFFEY, MARY DEMAREE

A SIMPLIFIED METHOD OF PHONICS UTILIZING THE GESTALT METHOD OF LEARNING IS PRESENTED. THE WORDS IN THIS COURSE IN PHONICS ARE TO BE TAUGHT AT A TIME DIFFERENT FROM THE READING CLASSES, BUT THE PRINCIPLES DEVELOPED ARE TO BE APPLIED DURING THE READING CLASSES. THE COURSE CAN BE USED WITH ANY BASIC TEXT AND STRESSES THE ABILITY OF CHILDREN TO…

Butterfly Phonics: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Merrell, Christine; Kasim, Adetayo

2015-01-01

Butterfly Phonics aims to improve the reading of struggling pupils through phonics instruction and a formal teaching style where pupils sit at desks in rows facing the teacher. It is based on a course book created by Irina Tyk, and was delivered in this evaluation by Real Action, a charity based in London. Real Action staff recruited and trained…

Phonemic Awareness and Beginning Reading and Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kamii, Constance; Manning, Maryann

2002-01-01

Examined English-speaking preschoolers' level of writing and their performance on oral-segmentation tasks. Found a close relationship between children's levels of writing and their levels of oral segmentation on a writing task in which they were asked to write four pairs of words, for example, "ham" and "hamster." Concluded…

Wilson Reading System[R]. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2007

2007-01-01

Wilson Reading System[R] is a supplemental reading and writing curriculum designed to promote reading accuracy (decoding) and spelling (encoding) skills for students with word-level deficits. The program is designed to teach phonemic awareness, alphabetic principles (sound-symbol relationship), word study, spelling, sight word instruction,…

Spelling well Despite Developmental Language Disorder: What Makes It Possible?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rakhlin, Natalia; Cardoso-Martins, Cláudia; Kornilov, Sergey A.; Grigorenko, Elena L.

2013-01-01

The goal of the study was to investigate the overlap between developmental language disorder (DLD) and developmental dyslexia, identified through spelling difficulties (SD), in Russian-speaking children. In particular, we studied the role of phoneme awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), pseudoword repetition (PWR), morphological (MA),…

Teaching Spelling: Which Strategies Work Best.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Angelisi, Mary Ann

In a third-grade classroom, a 3-week-long study was conducted on the pros, cons, and effects of three particular spelling strategies and activities. By focusing on two specific spelling strategies--phonemic awareness and word identification--the study hoped to indicate that conventional rote learning, drilling, and memorization do not help…

"Hey! This Book's Not Working Right."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schickedanz, Judith A.

1981-01-01

Argues that phonemic awareness in young readers may be knowledge that is constructed in the unique situation of trying to match speech to an alphabetic orthography. Stages of learning about print, teaching children about written language, and the roles of alphabet recognition and perceptual-motor skills in learning to read are discussed.…

Use of Writing with Symbols 2000 Software to Facilitate Emergent Literacy Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parette, Howard P.; Boeckmann, Nichole M.; Hourcade, Jack J.

2008-01-01

This paper outlines the use of the "Writing with Symbols 2000" software to facilitate emergent literacy development. The program's use of pictures incorporated with text has great potential to help young children with and without disabilities acquire fundamental literacy concepts about print, phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, vocabulary…

Identifying Predictors of End-of-Year Kindergarten Invented Spelling

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Murray, Maria S.

2009-01-01

Recent evidence suggests that invented spelling is valuable in predicting reading development, revealing which prereading skills children possess and still need to learn, and promoting development of early literacy skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness, and word reading…

Separating Speed from Accuracy in Beginning Reading Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Juul, Holger; Poulsen, Mads; Elbro, Carsten

2014-01-01

Phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are well-known kindergarten predictors of later word recognition skills, but it is not clear whether they predict developments in accuracy or speed, or both. The present longitudinal study of 172 Danish beginning readers found that speed of word recognition mainly developed…

Associations among Nonword Repetition and Phonemic and Vocabulary Awareness: Implications for Intervention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tattersall, Patricia J.; Nelson, Nickola Wolf; Tyler, Ann A.

2015-01-01

Prior research has shown possible relations among nonword repetition (NWR), vocabulary, and phonological processing skills in children with and without language impairment. This study was designed to investigate whether relationships would differ for students with primary language impairment (PLI) and typical language (TL) and whether they would…

PHONICS WITH CONTEXT CLUES AS APPLIED TO LANGUAGE ARTS.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

GUFFEY, MARY DEMAREE

A SIMPLIFIED METHOD OF PHONICS UTILIZING THE GESTALT METHOD OF LEARNING IS PRESENTED. THE WORDS IN THIS COURSE IN PHONICS ARE TO BE TAUGHT AT A TIME DIFFERENT FROM THE READING CLASSES, BUT THE PRINCIPLES DEVELOPED ARE TO BE APPLIED WITHIN THE READING CLASSES. THE COURSE CAN BE USED WITH ANY BASIC TEXT AND STRESSES THE ABILITY OF CHILDREN TO…

Synthetic Phonics and Learning to Read: A Cross-Language Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goswami, Usha

2005-01-01

Arguments about how to teach initial reading are once more in the news. Proponents of "synthetic phonics" argue that there is only one effective way to teach a child to read. In this anniversary issue, it is worth taking a step back from the polarisation of the "synthetic" versus "analytic" phonics debate, to consider the evidence base for reading…

Strategic Word Attack: Acquired Contextual Strategies in Young Readers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matz, Karl A.

A study demonstrated that young children who have difficulty with phonics can be taught to read through other methods, that phonics is only one of the many useful strategies that a child can employ, and that many contextual strategies are easier to learn and more reliable than phonics. A case study was conducted during an intervention with a young…

Using Digital Devices in a First Year Classroom: A Focus on the Design and Use of Phonics Software Applications

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nicholas, Maria; McKenzie, Sophie; Wells, Muriel A.

2017-01-01

When integrated within a holistic literacy program, phonics applications can be used in classrooms to facilitate students' self-directed learning of letter-sound knowledge; but are they designed to allow for such a purpose? With most phonics software applications making heavy use of image cues, this project has more specifically investigated…

Mentoring Teachers in Systematic Phonics Instruction: Effectiveness of an Intensive Year-Long Program for Kindergarten through 3rd Grade Teachers and Their Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ehri, Linnea C.; Flugman, Bert

2018-01-01

Teaching systematic phonics effectively to beginning readers requires specialized knowledge and training which many primary grade teachers lack. The current study examined effects of a year-long mentoring program to improve teachers' knowledge and effectiveness in teaching phonics and the extent that it improved students' achievement in reading…

Do Children Who Acquire Word Reading without Explicit Phonics Employ Compensatory Learning? Issues of Phonological Recoding, Lexical Orthography, and Fluency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thompson, G. Brian; McKay, Michael F.; Fletcher-Flinn, Claire M.; Connelly, Vincent; Kaa, Richard T.; Ewing, Jason

2008-01-01

Two studies were conducted across three countries to examine samples of beginning readers without systematic explicit phonics who had reached the same level of word reading accuracy as comparison samples with high and moderate explicit phonics. Had they employed any compensatory learning to reach that level? Four hypotheses of compensatory…

Separating the influences of prereading skills on early word and nonword reading.

PubMed

Shapiro, Laura R; Carroll, Julia M; Solity, Jonathan E

2013-10-01

The essential first step for a beginning reader is to learn to match printed forms to phonological representations. For a new word, this is an effortful process where each grapheme must be translated individually (serial decoding). The role of phonological awareness in developing a decoding strategy is well known. We examined whether beginning readers recruit different skills depending on the nature of the words being read (familiar words vs. nonwords). Print knowledge, phoneme and rhyme awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological short-term memory (STM), nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, auditory skills, and visual attention were measured in 392 prereaders 4 and 5 years of age. Word and nonword reading were measured 9 months later. We used structural equation modeling to examine the skills-reading relationship and modeled correlations between our two reading outcomes and among all prereading skills. We found that a broad range of skills were associated with reading outcomes: early print knowledge, phonological STM, phoneme awareness and RAN. Whereas all of these skills were directly predictive of nonword reading, early print knowledge was the only direct predictor of word reading. Our findings suggest that beginning readers draw most heavily on their existing print knowledge to read familiar words. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Efficacy of Supplemental Phonics-Based Instruction for Low-Skilled Kindergarteners in the Context of Language Minority Status and Classroom Phonics Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vadasy, Patricia F.; Sanders, Elizabeth A.

2010-01-01

This study tested the efficacy of supplemental phonics instruction for 84 low-skilled language minority (LM) kindergarteners and 64 non-LM kindergarteners at 10 urban public schools. Paraeducators were trained to provide the 18-week (January-May) intervention. Students performing in the bottom half of their classroom language group (LM and non-LM)…

Increasing Oral Reading Fluency in Upper Elementary Students through Direct Phonics Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Benton, Turrah S.

2016-01-01

Over the years, teachers have looked for the best way to teach their students to read. There are those who believe that teaching sight words is the best way to teach while others believe that a foundation in phonics instruction is a must. The purpose of this study is to determine the effect that phonics instruction has on the oral reading fluency…

A Comparison of Computer-Based and Multisensory Interventions on At-Risk Students' Reading Achievement

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reed, Marissa S.

2013-01-01

Over thirty years of extant literature exists regarding reading instruction, yet consensus in the field continues to diverge in the area of reading intervention. Despite the establishment of research-based programs in all five areas of reading (phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension), educators continue to…

Reading: Phonemic Awareness, Vocabulary Acquisition, Teaching and Intervention.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poliakof, Anne Rogers, Ed.

2001-01-01

To spread the word that reading instruction must be based on research and to improve the preparation of teachers to teach reading, this edition of "Basic Education" emphasizes some of the most significant findings of recent reading research and suggests how these findings should translate into immediate action and policy. The first article, "A…

A Comparative Case Study of Learning Strategies and Recommendations of Five Professional Musicians with Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nelson, Kent Peter; Hourigan, Ryan M.

2016-01-01

Many of the characteristics of dyslexia--such as difficulties with decoding written symbols, phonemic awareness, physical coordination, and readable handwriting--may adversely affect music learning. Despite challenges, individuals with dyslexia can succeed in music. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of five professional…

Speech Perception Abilities of Adults with Dyslexia: Is There Any Evidence for a True Deficit?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hazan, Valerie; Messaoud-Galusi, Souhila; Rosen, Stuart; Nouwens, Suzan; Shakespeare, Bethanie

2009-01-01

Purpose: This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise. Method: Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and…

Why Do More Boys than Girls Have a Reading Disability? A Review of the Evidence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Limbrick, Lisa; Wheldall, Kevin; Madelaine, Alison

2011-01-01

A number of explanations have been proposed in recent years to account for the observed preponderance of boys with a reading disability. The most notable explanations offered for gender differences in reading disability relate to differences in phonemic awareness, auditory processing, behaviour, neurology, variability in cognitive ability and…

Facial Speech Gestures: The Relation between Visual Speech Processing, Phonological Awareness, and Developmental Dyslexia in 10-Year-Olds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaadt, Gesa; Männel, Claudia; van der Meer, Elke; Pannekamp, Ann; Friederici, Angela D.

2016-01-01

Successful communication in everyday life crucially involves the processing of auditory and visual components of speech. Viewing our interlocutor and processing visual components of speech facilitates speech processing by triggering auditory processing. Auditory phoneme processing, analyzed by event-related brain potentials (ERP), has been shown…

Predictors of Early versus Later Spelling Development in Danish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nielsen, Anne-Mette Veber; Juul, Holger

2016-01-01

The present study examined phoneme awareness, phonological short term memory, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) as longitudinal predictors of spelling skills in an early phase (Grade 2) and a later phase (Grade 5) of development in a sample of 140 children learning to spell in the…

Degree of Illiteracy and Phonological and Metaphonological Skills in Unschooled Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Loureiro, Clara de Santos; Willadino Braga, Lucia; Souza, Ligia do Nascimento; Filho, Gilberto Nunes; Queiroz, Elizabeth; Dellatolas, Georges

2004-01-01

Phonological and metaphonological skills are explored in 97 Brazilian illiterate and semiliterate adults. A simple letter- and word-reading task was used to define the degree of illiteracy. Phonemic awareness was strongly dependent on the level of letter and word reading ability. Phonological memory was very low in illiterates and unrelated to…

How Well Prepared Are Australian Preservice Teachers to Teach Early Reading Skills?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Meeks, Linda J.; Kemp, Coral R.

2017-01-01

Preservice early childhood and primary teachers from teacher preparation institutions across five Australian states were surveyed regarding their perceptions of preparedness and ability to teach early reading and spelling skills, as well as their knowledge of components of early reading, such as phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge and early…

Advancing English Literacy by Improving ASL Skills: A Residential School's Quest

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dolman, David; Rook, Laurie

2017-01-01

This article describes and evaluates one residential school for the deaf and hard of hearing, Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf (ENCSD), and their experience in implementing the Fairview Learning program. The program consists of five components (Schimmel & Edwards, 2003). Two of the components--phonemic awareness and literature-based…

Reading and Language Intervention for Children at Risk of Dyslexia: A Randomised Controlled Trial

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Duff, Fiona J.; Hulme, Charles; Grainger, Katy; Hardwick, Samantha J.; Miles, Jeremy N. V.; Snowling, Margaret J.

2014-01-01

Background: Intervention studies for children at risk of dyslexia have typically been delivered preschool, and show short-term effects on letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, with little transfer to literacy. Methods: This randomised controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of a reading and language intervention for 6-year-old children…

Early Literacy Intervention for Preschoolers Who Need Tier 3 Support

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaminski, Ruth A.; Powell-Smith, Kelly A.

2017-01-01

Phonemic awareness has been consistently identified as an essential skill for as well as an important predictor of later reading achievement. Children who lack these early literacy skills at kindergarten entry are more likely to demonstrate both short- and long-term reading difficulties. Despite the importance of providing intervention early,…

Successful Strategies of Individuals with Dyslexia in the Field of Music: A Comparative Case Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nelson, Kent Peter

2014-01-01

Many of the symptoms of dyslexia--such as difficulties with decoding written symbols, phonemic awareness, physical coordination, and readable handwriting--may adversely affect music learning. Despite challenges, some individuals with dyslexia succeed in music. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of five professional musicians…

Application of a Multitiered System of Support with English Language Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vanderwood, Mike L.; Tung, Catherine; Arellano, Elizabeth

2014-01-01

This study examined the effects of a phonological awareness (PA) intervention on the phonological and alphabetic principle skills of first-grade English language learners (ELLs). Nine first-grade classrooms in two large elementary schools were screened with DIBELS Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) in the fall and…

Does Poor Spelling Equate to Limited Word Choice? The Role of Spelling in Word Choice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Avery, Mina J.

2016-01-01

Does spelling matter? is a question that has been answered in many ways. Yes, spelling matters because conventional spelling is necessary for accurate transcription. Yes, spelling matters because spelling skills support phonemic awareness, word recognition skills, and the acquisition of the alphabetic principle. And yes, spelling matters because…

Genetic and Environmental Influences on Individual Differences in Printed Word Recognition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gayan, Javier; Olson, Richard K.

2003-01-01

Explored genetic and environmental etiologies of individual differences in printed word recognition and related skills in identical and fraternal twin 8- to 18-year-olds. Found evidence for moderate genetic influences common between IQ, phoneme awareness, and word-reading skills and for stronger IQ-independent genetic influences that were common…

Reading?...Pah! (I Got It!): Innovative Reading Techniques for Successful Deaf Readers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schimmel, Connie (Ruth) S.; Edwards, Sandra G.; Prickett, Hugh T.

1999-01-01

A reading program utilizing five components (a shortcut to phonemic awareness, Adapted Dolch words, Bridge lists and the Bridging process, reading comprehension, and American Sign Language development/language experience stories) resulted in dramatic gains in the reading levels of 48 elementary students at a residential school for the deaf.…

Read Me a Song: Teaching Reading Using Picture Book Songs.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Routier, Wanda J.

This paper provides information about the beginnings of literacy in young children and the skills they need for reading readiness. The paper also describes what is meant by a "quality early literacy instruction" and reading skill development in early childhood settings. It outlines early reading behaviors, including phonemic awareness,…

Exploring the Relationship between Use of a Selected Phonics Program and the Oral Reading Fluency and Nonsense Word Fluency Scores of First-Grade Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Day, Bryce B.

2017-01-01

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the effects, if any, of a supplemental phonics curriculum, Saxon Phonics, on the reading achievement of first-grade students in one mountain-west, semirural, school district. The design was casual-comparative and ex post facto, and answered the questions: (1) Do students taught using a…

Using Method of Instruction to Predict the Skills Supporting Initial Reading Development: Insight from a Synthetic Phonics Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McGeown, Sarah P.; Medford, Emma

2014-01-01

This study examined the skills predicting early reading development when children were taught by a synthetic phonics approach. Eighty five children taught to read by systematic synthetic phonics were assessed on reading and cognitive assessments prior to reading instruction (average age 4 years, 7 months), 6 months later (5 years, 1 month), and 73…

Long-Term Effects of Synthetic versus Analytic Phonics Teaching on the Reading and Spelling Ability of 10 Year Old Boys and Girls

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johnston, Rhona S.; McGeown, Sarah; Watson, Joyce E.

2012-01-01

A comparison was made of 10-year-old boys and girls who had learnt to read by analytic or synthetic phonics methods as part of their early literacy programmes. The boys taught by the synthetic phonics method had better word reading than the girls in their classes, and their spelling and reading comprehension was as good. In contrast, with analytic…

Learning to perceive and recognize a second language: the L2LP model revised.

PubMed

van Leussen, Jan-Willem; Escudero, Paola

2015-01-01

We present a test of a revised version of the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model, a computational model of the acquisition of second language (L2) speech perception and recognition. The model draws on phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguistic constructs to explain a number of L2 learning scenarios. However, a recent computational implementation failed to validate a theoretical proposal for a learning scenario where the L2 has less phonemic categories than the native language (L1) along a given acoustic continuum. According to the L2LP, learners faced with this learning scenario must not only shift their old L1 phoneme boundaries but also reduce the number of categories employed in perception. Our proposed revision to L2LP successfully accounts for this updating in the number of perceptual categories as a process driven by the meaning of lexical items, rather than by the learners' awareness of the number and type of phonemes that are relevant in their new language, as the previous version of L2LP assumed. Results of our simulations show that meaning-driven learning correctly predicts the developmental path of L2 phoneme perception seen in empirical studies. Additionally, and to contribute to a long-standing debate in psycholinguistics, we test two versions of the model, with the stages of phonemic perception and lexical recognition being either sequential or interactive. Both versions succeed in learning to recognize minimal pairs in the new L2, but make diverging predictions on learners' resulting phonological representations. In sum, the proposed revision to the L2LP model contributes to our understanding of L2 acquisition, with implications for speech processing in general.

The Relative Contributions of Vocabulary, Decoding, and Phonemic Awareness to Word Reading in English versus German

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suggate, Sebastian; Reese, Elaine; Lenhard, Wolfgang; Schneider, Wolfgang

2014-01-01

Beginning readers in shallow orthographies acquire word reading skills more quickly than in deep orthographies like English. In addition to extending this evidence base by comparing reading acquisition in English with the more transparent German, we conducted a longitudinal study and investigated whether different early reading skills made…

Phonological Processing and Word Reading in Typically Developing and Reading Disabled Children: Severity Matters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Groot, Barry J. A.; van den Bos, Kees P.; Minnaert, Alexander E. M. G.; van der Meulen, Bieuwe F.

2015-01-01

In this study word reading (WR) fluency was used to dichotomously classify 1,598 Dutch children at different cutoffs, indicating (very) poor or (very) good reading performance. Analysis of variance and receiver operating characteristics were used to investigate the effects of rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonemic awareness (PA) in predicting…

Early Literacy Research: Findings Primary-Grade Teachers Will Want to Know

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reutzel, D. Ray

2015-01-01

This article shares recent research findings in early literacy that every primary grade teacher has had questions about at one time or another ranging from handwriting to phonemic awareness, writing to concepts about print, and more. The article reports research that elaborates upon and extends early literacy research that was reported by the…

Contextual and Non-Contextual Knowledge in Emergent Literacy Development: A Comparison between Children from Low Ses and Middle Ses Communities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Korat, O.

2005-01-01

This research had three aims: first, to examine the relationship between two components of emergent literacy: contextual (environmental print, print functions, identifying literacy activities) and non-contextual knowledge (e.g., letters' names, phonemic awareness, concept of print, etc.); second, to explore the relationship between children's…

How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords with Final Consonant Clusters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shollenbarger, Amy J.; Robinson, Gregory C.; Taran, Valentina; Choi, Seo-eun

2017-01-01

Purpose: This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords.…

Quality Standards Matter: A Comparative Case Study Examining Interactive Writing in the Preschool Setting

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hall, Anna H.

2017-01-01

Interactive writing is a research-based early literacy strategy that has been found effective at increasing young children's oral language skills, alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, concepts of print, and early writing skills. This paper reports on a case study which explored the feasibility and fidelity of implementing interactive writing in…

Teachers' Knowledge of Dominie Reading and Writing Assessment Portfolio Word-Level Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kershaw, Maxine Y.

2017-01-01

There is confusion among teachers in a school district in a southeastern state about the instructional use of the state-mandated Dominie assessment for word-level reading and phonemic awareness skills for kindergarten and first-grade students. Recent assessment data indicated that 20% of students tested in kindergarten and first grade needed…

Some Indicators of Literacy Development in Prekindergarten: A Research Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nurss, Joanne R.

During a 5-month period, an attempt was made to describe the literacy concepts of 12 children 5 years of age who attended a prekindergarten program rich in oral language experiences. Assessments were made in the classroom of the children's concepts of print, phoneme awareness, logo recognition, reading, and writing, through use of (1) the…

Phonemic Awareness versus Meaning Instruction in Beginning Reading: A Discussion.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Partridge, Susan

Two Schools of thought prominent in reading instruction are: (1) that reading is a language-based skill which requires the reader to have a sound knowledge of phonology and that this knowledge must be at an automatic level of information processing; and (2) that reading problems are the result of being overly attentive to phonetic and orthographic…

Grimm's Law: Fact or Myth?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gessman, Albert M.

1990-01-01

Discusses phonic shifting or sound shifts through an examination of Grimm's Law, or the Germanic Consonant Shift. The discussion includes comments on why the phonic shift developed and its pattern. (10 references) (GLR)

Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children.

PubMed

Yeung, Susanna S S; Siegel, Linda S; Chan, Carol K K

2013-05-01

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.

Brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children and its disruption in dyslexia.

PubMed

Kovelman, Ioulia; Norton, Elizabeth S; Christodoulou, Joanna A; Gaab, Nadine; Lieberman, Daniel A; Triantafyllou, Christina; Wolf, Maryanne; Whitfield-Gabrieli, Susan; Gabrieli, John D E

2012-04-01

Phonological awareness, knowledge that speech is composed of syllables and phonemes, is critical for learning to read. Phonological awareness precedes and predicts successful transition from language to literacy, and weakness in phonological awareness is a leading cause of dyslexia, but the brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children is unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of phonological awareness using an auditory word-rhyming task in children who were typical readers or who had dyslexia (ages 7-13) and a younger group of kindergarteners (ages 5-6). Typically developing children, but not children with dyslexia, recruited left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when making explicit phonological judgments. Kindergarteners, who were matched to the older children with dyslexia on standardized tests of phonological awareness, also recruited left DLPFC. Left DLPFC may play a critical role in the development of phonological awareness for spoken language critical for reading and in the etiology of dyslexia.

Examining Central Issues in Literacy Research, Theory, and Practice. Forty-Second Yearbook of the National Reading Conference.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leu, Donald J., Ed.; Kinzer, Charles K., Ed.

The 43 conference papers in this yearbook cover such diverse topics in the field of reading as the analysis of children's literacy responses, the study of aesthetic literacy, and the investigation of phonemic awareness. The yearbook includes both data-driven studies and conceptual explorations of diverse literacy learners. The yearbook opens with…

Cross-Linguistic Interactions Influence Reading Development in Bilinguals: A Comparison between Early Balanced French-Basque and Spanish-Basque Bilingual Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lallier, Marie; Acha, Joana; Carreiras, Manuel

2016-01-01

This study investigates whether orthographic consistency and transparency of languages have an impact on the development of reading strategies and reading sub-skills (i.e. phonemic awareness and visual attention span) in bilingual children. We evaluated 21 French (opaque)-Basque (transparent) bilingual children and 21 Spanish (transparent)-Basque…

Relationships among L1 Print Exposure and Early L1 Literacy Skills, L2 Aptitude, and L2 Proficiency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sparks, Richard L.; Patton, Jon; Ganschow, Leonore; Humbach, Nancy

2012-01-01

Authors examined the relationship between individual differences in L1 print exposure and differences in early L1 skills and later L2 aptitude, L2 proficiency, and L2 classroom achievement. Participants were administered measures of L1 word decoding, spelling, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, receptive vocabulary, and listening…

English as a Foreign Language Spelling Development: A Longitudinal Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kahn-Horwitz, Janina; Sparks, Richard L.; Goldstein, Zahava

2012-01-01

English as a foreign language (EFL) spelling was examined longitudinally three times (4th, 9th, 12th grades) during 9 years of EFL study among Hebrew first language (L1) students. The study examined the impact of L1 literacy variables including phonemic awareness, word attack, and spelling on EFL spelling and the relationship between EFL literacy…

Phonological Awareness Errors Mirror Underlying Phonological Representations: Evidence from Hebrew L1-English L2 Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Russak, Susie; Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor

2017-01-01

This article examines the effect of phonological context (singleton vs. clustered consonants) on full phoneme segmentation in Hebrew first language (L1) and in English second language (L2) among typically reading adults (TR) and adults with reading disability (RD) (n = 30 per group), using quantitative analysis and a fine-grained analysis of…

Dyslexia in Adults: Evidence for Deficits in Non-Word Reading and in the Phonological Representation of Lexical Items.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Elbro, Carsten; And Others

1994-01-01

Compared to controls, adults (n=102) who reported a history of difficulties in learning to read were disabled in phonological coding, but less disabled in reading comprehension. Adults with poor phonological coding skills had basic deficits in phonological representations of spoken words, even when semantic word knowledge, phonemic awareness,…

Reading Ability in Ethiopian Learners of Hebrew: How Important Is Phonemic Awareness?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Abu-Rabia, Salim

2004-01-01

The study investigated reading errors made by Ethiopian learners of Hebrew (n=34). These newcomers to Israel, unlike other groups such as the Russian Jews, typically have low literacy skills in their first language (Amharic). Their ability to read Hebrew, as judged on a reading comprehension test, was still poor after living in Israel for seven…

The missing foundation in teacher education: Knowledge of the structure of spoken and written language.

PubMed

Moats, L C

1994-01-01

Reading research supports the necessity for directly teaching concepts about linguistic structure to beginning readers and to students with reading and spelling difficulties. In this study, experienced teachers of reading, language arts, and special education were tested to determine if they have the requisite awareness of language elements (e.g., phonemes, morphemes) and of how these elements are represented in writing (e.g., knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences). The results were surprisingly poor, indicating that even motivated and experienced teachers typically understand too little about spoken and written language structure to be able to provide sufficient instruction in these areas. The utility of language structure knowledge for instructional planning, for assessment of student progress, and for remediation of literacy problems is discussed.The teachers participating in the study subsequently took a course focusing on phonemic awareness training, spoken-written language relationships, and careful analysis of spelling and reading behavior in children. At the end of the course, the teachers judged this information to be essential for teaching and advised that it become a prerequisite for certification. Recommendations for requirements and content of teacher education programs are presented.

We Do Teach Phonics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fisher, Bobbi

1995-01-01

A primary-grade teacher describes how she uses singing to teach phonics in her classroom. Notes how children are helped to integrate the three cuing systems of language--semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic--as they read and sing together. (ET)

Lexical restructuring in the absence of literacy.

PubMed

Venturaa, Paulo; Kolinsky, Régine; Fernandesa, Sandra; Queridoa, Luís; Morais, José

2007-11-01

Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In J. L. Metsala & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 89-120). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.]). Although literacy was not explicitly mentioned in this lexical restructuring hypothesis, the process of learning to read and spell might also have a significant impact on the specification of lexical representations (e.g., [Carroll, J. M., & Snowling, M. J. (2001). The effects of global similarity between stimuli on children's judgments of rime and alliteration. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 327-342.]; [Goswami, U. (2000). Phonological representations, reading development and dyslexia: Towards a cross-linguistic theoretical framework. Dyslexia, 6, 133-151.]). This is what we checked in the present study. We manipulated word frequency and neighborhood density in a gating task (Experiment 1) and a word-identification-in-noise task (Experiment 2) presented to Portuguese literate and illiterate adults. Ex-illiterates were also tested in Experiment 2 in order to disentangle the effects of vocabulary size and literacy. There was an interaction between word frequency and neighborhood density, which was similar in the three groups. These did not differ even for the words that are supposed to undergo lexical restructuring the latest (low frequency words from sparse neighborhoods). Thus, segmental lexical representations seem to develop independently of literacy. While segmental restructuring is not affected by literacy, it constrains the development of phoneme awareness as shown by the fact that, in Experiment 3, neighborhood density modulated the phoneme deletion performance of both illiterates and ex-illiterates.

A multicenter examination and strategic revisions of the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale.

PubMed

McGuire, Joseph F; Piacentini, John; Storch, Eric A; Murphy, Tanya K; Ricketts, Emily J; Woods, Douglas W; Walkup, John W; Peterson, Alan L; Wilhelm, Sabine; Lewin, Adam B; McCracken, James T; Leckman, James F; Scahill, Lawrence

2018-05-08

To examine the internal consistency and distribution of the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS) scores to inform modification of the measure. This cross-sectional study included 617 participants with a tic disorder (516 children and 101 adults), who completed an age-appropriate diagnostic interview and the YGTSS to evaluate tic symptom severity. The distributions of scores on YGTSS dimensions were evaluated for normality and skewness. For dimensions that were skewed across motor and phonic tics, a modified Delphi consensus process was used to revise selected anchor points. Children and adults had similar clinical characteristics, including tic symptom severity. All participants were examined together. Strong internal consistency was identified for the YGTSS Motor Tic score (α = 0.80), YGTSS Phonic Tic score (α = 0.87), and YGTSS Total Tic score (α = 0.82). The YGTSS Total Tic and Impairment scores exhibited relatively normal distributions. Several subscales and individual item scales departed from a normal distribution. Higher scores were more often used on the Motor Tic Number, Frequency, and Intensity dimensions and the Phonic Tic Frequency dimension. By contrast, lower scores were more often used on Motor Tic Complexity and Interference, and Phonic Tic Number, Intensity, Complexity, and Interference. The YGTSS exhibits good internal consistency across children and adults. The parallel findings across Motor and Phonic Frequency, Complexity, and Interference dimensions prompted minor revisions to the anchor point description to promote use of the full range of scores in each dimension. Specific minor revisions to the YGTSS Phonic Tic Symptom Checklist were also proposed. © 2018 American Academy of Neurology.

Learner Acquisition of Dialect Variation in a Study Abroad Context: The Case of the Spanish [Theta

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ringer-Hilfinger, Kathryn

2012-01-01

The present study aims at analyzing the acquisition of dialect variation by native English-speaking university students who study Spanish for a semester in Spain. The selected variable is the phoneme /[theta]/ (theta). The goal is to assess learner awareness, opinion, and use of [theta]. Data were elicited through a set of oral and written tasks…

Follow-Up Study of the Effects of a Supplemental Early Reading Intervention on the Reading/Disability Risk of Urban Primary Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cartledge, Gwendolyn; Yurick, Amanda; Singh, Angella Harjani; Keyes, Starr E.; Kourea, Lefki

2011-01-01

Early intervention to mitigate special education and reading risk is especially critical for low socioeconomic and minority learners. This study examined the lasting effects of an early reading intervention package of phonemic awareness on the reading skills of 38 second-grade students one and two years after intervention ended. The participants…

Reading and Reading-Related Skills in Children Using Cochlear Implants: Prospects for the Influence of Cued Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bouton, Sophie; Bertoncini, Josiane; Serniclaes, Willy; Cole, Pascale

2011-01-01

We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1…

A Correlational Study of the Relationships between Music Aptitude and Phonemic Awareness of Kindergarten Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rubinson, Laura E.

2010-01-01

More than one third of American children cannot read at a basic level by fourth grade (Lee, Grigg, & Donahue, 2007) and those numbers are even higher for African American, Hispanic and poor White students (Boorman et al., 2007). These are alarming statistics given that the ability to read is the most basic and fundamental skill for academic…

Second language learners who are at-risk for reading disabilities: A growth mixture model study.

PubMed

Yeung, Susanna S

2018-05-11

This one-year longitudinal study examined the developmental trajectories of English reading in Chinese children learning English as a second language (ESL) and identified cognitive profiles of children who are at risk for English reading disability. One hundred and eighty-four Chinese ESL children from eight Hong Kong kindergartens were measured four times during their last year of kindergarten for phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary and English word reading. Growth mixture modeling was applied to classify the children based on their growth trajectories in English word reading. Four subgroups of word reading growth were classified, namely high-achieving, fast-growth, slow-growth and low-achieving groups. The cognitive-linguistic skills were compared across different groups with age, non-verbal intelligence and receptive vocabulary in L1 controlled. The results showed that low-achieving groups, who were expected to be at-risk for L2 reading disability, showed deficits in letter-name knowledge, phonemic awareness, and receptive and expressive vocabulary. Fast-growth and high-achieving groups were not distinguishable on the measured cognitive-linguistic skills. Children in the low-growth groups were significantly weaker in phonemic awareness, receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary than children in the high-achieving group. Our findings identified specific cognitive-linguistic deficits that were associated with children who are at-risk for reading disability. Implications for the early identification of L2 reading disability were discussed. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Why Aren't You Using the Phonics Workbooks? (When the Principal Asks).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harp, Bill

1989-01-01

Asserts that reading and writing skill instruction should not be taught as a set of discrete steps with phonics workbooks, but instead should be based on examples taken from texts which children write and read. (MM)

Phonology and reading: a response to Wang, Trezek, Luckner, and Paul.

PubMed

Allen, Thomas E; Clark, M Diane; del Giudice, Alex; Koo, Daniel; Lieberman, Amy; Mayberry, Rachel; Miller, Paul

2009-01-01

Four critical responses to an article, "The Role of Phonology and Phonologically Related Skills in Reading Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing" (Wang, Trezek, Luckner, & Paul, 2008), are presented. Issue is taken with the conclusions of the article by Wang and colleagues regarding the "necessary" condition of phonological awareness for the development of reading skills among deaf readers. Research findings (not cited by Wang and colleagues) are pointed out that reveal weak correlations between phonemic awareness and reading comprehension, and stronger correlations between other variables such as overall language skill and early exposure to a visual language.

Weighting of Acoustic Cues to a Manner Distinction by Children With and Without Hearing Loss

PubMed Central

Lowenstein, Joanna H.

2015-01-01

Purpose Children must develop optimal perceptual weighting strategies for processing speech in their first language. Hearing loss can interfere with that development, especially if cochlear implants are required. The three goals of this study were to measure, for children with and without hearing loss: (a) cue weighting for a manner distinction, (b) sensitivity to those cues, and (c) real-world communication functions. Method One hundred and seven children (43 with normal hearing [NH], 17 with hearing aids [HAs], and 47 with cochlear implants [CIs]) performed several tasks: labeling of stimuli from /bɑ/-to-/wɑ/ continua varying in formant and amplitude rise time (FRT and ART), discrimination of ART, word recognition, and phonemic awareness. Results Children with hearing loss were less attentive overall to acoustic structure than children with NH. Children with CIs, but not those with HAs, weighted FRT less and ART more than children with NH. Sensitivity could not explain cue weighting. FRT cue weighting explained significant amounts of variability in word recognition and phonemic awareness; ART cue weighting did not. Conclusion Signal degradation inhibits access to spectral structure for children with CIs, but cannot explain their delayed development of optimal weighting strategies. Auditory training could strengthen the weighting of spectral cues for children with CIs, thus aiding spoken language acquisition. PMID:25813201

Speech perception of sine-wave signals by children with cochlear implants

PubMed Central

Nittrouer, Susan; Kuess, Jamie; Lowenstein, Joanna H.

2015-01-01

Children need to discover linguistically meaningful structures in the acoustic speech signal. Being attentive to recurring, time-varying formant patterns helps in that process. However, that kind of acoustic structure may not be available to children with cochlear implants (CIs), thus hindering development. The major goal of this study was to examine whether children with CIs are as sensitive to time-varying formant structure as children with normal hearing (NH) by asking them to recognize sine-wave speech. The same materials were presented as speech in noise, as well, to evaluate whether any group differences might simply reflect general perceptual deficits on the part of children with CIs. Vocabulary knowledge, phonemic awareness, and “top-down” language effects were all also assessed. Finally, treatment factors were examined as possible predictors of outcomes. Results showed that children with CIs were as accurate as children with NH at recognizing sine-wave speech, but poorer at recognizing speech in noise. Phonemic awareness was related to that recognition. Top-down effects were similar across groups. Having had a period of bimodal stimulation near the time of receiving a first CI facilitated these effects. Results suggest that children with CIs have access to the important time-varying structure of vocal-tract formants. PMID:25994709

Good Phonic Generalizations for Decoding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gates, Louis

2007-01-01

An exhaustive analysis of 88,641 individual letters and letter combinations within 16,928 words drawn from the Zeno, et al. word list unveiled remarkable phonic transparency. The individual letter and letter combinations sorted into just six general categories: three basic categories of vowels (single vowels, vowel digraphs, and final…

Metaphoric Investigation of the Phonic-Based Sentence Method

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dogan, Birsen

2012-01-01

This study aimed to understand the views of prospective teachers with "phonic-based sentence method" through metaphoric images. In this descriptive study, the participants involve the prospective teachers who take reading-writing instruction courses in Primary School Classroom Teaching Program of the Education Faculty of Pamukkale…

Phonological abilities in literacy-impaired children: Brain potentials reveal deficient phoneme discrimination, but intact prosodic processing.

PubMed

Männel, Claudia; Schaadt, Gesa; Illner, Franziska K; van der Meer, Elke; Friederici, Angela D

2017-02-01

Intact phonological processing is crucial for successful literacy acquisition. While individuals with difficulties in reading and spelling (i.e., developmental dyslexia) are known to experience deficient phoneme discrimination (i.e., segmental phonology), findings concerning their prosodic processing (i.e., suprasegmental phonology) are controversial. Because there are no behavior-independent studies on the underlying neural correlates of prosodic processing in dyslexia, these controversial findings might be explained by different task demands. To provide an objective behavior-independent picture of segmental and suprasegmental phonological processing in impaired literacy acquisition, we investigated event-related brain potentials during passive listening in typically and poor-spelling German school children. For segmental phonology, we analyzed the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) during vowel length discrimination, capturing automatic auditory deviancy detection in repetitive contexts. For suprasegmental phonology, we analyzed the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) that automatically occurs in response to prosodic boundaries. Our results revealed spelling group differences for the MMN, but not for the CPS, indicating deficient segmental, but intact suprasegmental phonological processing in poor spellers. The present findings point towards a differential role of segmental and suprasegmental phonology in literacy disorders and call for interventions that invigorate impaired literacy by utilizing intact prosody in addition to training deficient phonemic awareness. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Facilitating Emergent Literacy Skills: A Literature-Based, Multiple Intelligence Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brand, Susan Trostle

2006-01-01

Educators have continually sought to achieve a balance between a phonics-based, code-emphasis program and a more holistic, meaning-based approach to emergent literacy instruction. This article describes an integrated phonics and literature-based approach to developing children's emergent literacy skills. These skills included alphabet knowledge,…

Phonics Pathways. 7th Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hiskes, Dolores G.

This book uses phonics to teach reading in a complete manual for beginning and remedial readers of all ages. The book builds sounds and spelling patterns slowly and systematically into syllables, phrases, and sentences of gradually increasing complexity, presenting only one sound per lesson--each new sound builds upon previously learned skills for…

Making Sense of Phonics: The Hows and Whys. Second Edition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beck, Isabel L.; Beck, Mark E.

2013-01-01

This bestselling book provides indispensable tools and strategies for explicit, systematic phonics instruction in K-3. Teachers learn effective ways to build students' decoding skills by teaching letter-sound relationships, blending, word building, multisyllabic decoding, fluency, and more. The volume is packed with engaging classroom activities,…

Phonics Instruction for Disabled Learners: Applying Theory to Method. Technical Report # 7.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fayne, Harriet R.

To design effective remedial phonics instruction, it is necessary to examine both learner characteristics and task requirements. The paper integrates research related to information processing and psycholinguistics to formulate questions which can be used to evaluate techniques and materials used with a learning disabled population. Information…

Phonological awareness: explicit instruction for young deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

PubMed

Miller, Elizabeth M; Lederberg, Amy R; Easterbrooks, Susan R

2013-04-01

The goal of this study was to explore the development of spoken phonological awareness for deaf and hard-of-hearing children (DHH) with functional hearing (i.e., the ability to access spoken language through hearing). Teachers explicitly taught five preschoolers the phonological awareness skills of syllable segmentation, initial phoneme isolation, and rhyme discrimination in the context of a multifaceted emergent literacy intervention. Instruction occurred in settings where teachers used simultaneous communication or spoken language only. A multiple-baseline across skills design documented a functional relation between instruction and skill acquisition for those children who did not have the skills at baseline with one exception; one child did not meet criteria for syllable segmentation. These results were confirmed by changes on phonological awareness tests that were administered at the beginning and end of the school year. We found that DHH children who varied in primary communication mode, chronological age, and language ability all benefited from explicit instruction in phonological awareness.

Ethics, Education Policy and Research: The Phonics Question Reconsidered

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ellis, Sue; Moss, Gemma

2014-01-01

This paper argues that direct control of the early years literacy curriculum recently exercised by politicians in England has made the boundaries between research, policy and practice increasingly fragile. It describes how policy came to focus most effort on the use of synthetic phonics programmes in the early years. It examines why the…

Teachers' Perceptions of the Impact of the Jolly Phonics Program on Students' Literacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moodie-Reid, Lorane

2016-01-01

At 2 primary schools in Western Jamaica, students at the Grade 1 level lacked basic literacy skills of comprehension, letter recognition, letter sounds, and oral communication. The purpose of this qualitative evaluation study was to investigate teachers' perceptions of the Jolly Phonics program implemented to improve students' literacy in Grades…

Are There Alternatives in Reading Textbooks? An Examination of Three Beginning Reading Programs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hiebert, Elfrieda H.; Martin, Leigh Ann; Menon, Shailaja

2005-01-01

The first-grade components of three textbook programs--mainstream basal, combined phonics and literature, and phonics emphasis--were compared on cognitive load (e.g., number of different words) and linguistic content (e.g., number of monosyllabic, simple vowel words). Three levels of three components of a program--literature anthologies, decodable…

Piecing Together Phonics and Whole Language: A Balanced Approach.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pernai, Karen; Pulciani, Jodie; Vahle, Heather

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the implementation of the Hello Reader Scholastic Phonics program as an addition to an already rich, literature-based curriculum. Test data suggested that primary grade students were not developing phonetic skills sufficient to meet district expectations. This research was designed to…

Synthetic Phonics and the Teaching of Reading: The Debate Surrounding England's Rose Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wyse, Dominic; Styles, Morag

2007-01-01

The Rose Report, commissioned by the Secretary of State for Education for England, recommended in March 2006 that early reading instruction must include synthetic phonics. This paper evaluates the extent to which research evidence supports this recommendation. In particular, a review of international research into the teaching of early reading…

A Randomised Efficacy Study of Web-Based Synthetic and Analytic Programmes among Disadvantaged Urban Kindergarten Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Comaskey, Erin M.; Savage, Robert S.; Abrami, Philip

2009-01-01

This study explores whether two computer-based literacy interventions--a "synthetic phonics" and an "analytic phonics" approach produce qualitatively distinct effects on the early phonological abilities and reading skills of disadvantaged urban Kindergarten (Reception) children. Participants (n=53) were assigned by random allocation to one of the…

Phonics and Semiotics for Early Intervention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lu, Lucia Y.

2010-01-01

Clay's Reading Recovery has been one of the most effective one-to-one tutorial sessions. To make the daily lesson more interesting and fully engage the at-risk readers, the author modified Clay's Reading Recovery Program by conceptualizing phonics and semiotics into early intervention. In this case study, three at-risk first graders formed an…

Shared Book Reading Promotes Not Only Language Development, But Also Grapheme Awareness in German Kindergarten Children

PubMed Central

Wesseling, Patricia B. C.; Christmann, Corinna A.; Lachmann, Thomas

2017-01-01

Effects of shared book reading on expressive vocabulary and grapheme awareness without letter instruction in German kindergarteners (longitudinal; N = 69, 3;0–4;8 years) were investigated. Expressive vocabulary was measured by using a standardized test; grapheme awareness was measured by asking children to identify one grapheme per trial presented amongst non-letter distractors. Two methods of shared book reading were investigated, literacy enrichment (additional books) and teacher training in shared book reading strategies, both without explicit letter instruction. Whereas positive effects of shared book reading on expressive vocabulary were evident in numerous previous studies, the impact of shared book reading on grapheme awareness has not yet been investigated. Both methods resulted in positive effects on children’s expressive vocabulary and grapheme awareness over a period of 6 months. Thus, early shared book reading may not only be considered to be a tool for promoting the development of expressive vocabulary, but also for implicit acquisition of grapheme awareness. The latter is considered an important precondition required for the explicit learning of grapheme–phoneme conversion rules (letter knowledge). PMID:28377732

Shared Book Reading Promotes Not Only Language Development, But Also Grapheme Awareness in German Kindergarten Children.

PubMed

Wesseling, Patricia B C; Christmann, Corinna A; Lachmann, Thomas

2017-01-01

Effects of shared book reading on expressive vocabulary and grapheme awareness without letter instruction in German kindergarteners (longitudinal; N = 69, 3;0-4;8 years) were investigated. Expressive vocabulary was measured by using a standardized test; grapheme awareness was measured by asking children to identify one grapheme per trial presented amongst non-letter distractors. Two methods of shared book reading were investigated, literacy enrichment (additional books) and teacher training in shared book reading strategies, both without explicit letter instruction. Whereas positive effects of shared book reading on expressive vocabulary were evident in numerous previous studies, the impact of shared book reading on grapheme awareness has not yet been investigated. Both methods resulted in positive effects on children's expressive vocabulary and grapheme awareness over a period of 6 months. Thus, early shared book reading may not only be considered to be a tool for promoting the development of expressive vocabulary, but also for implicit acquisition of grapheme awareness. The latter is considered an important precondition required for the explicit learning of grapheme-phoneme conversion rules (letter knowledge).

Auditory Middle Latency Response and Phonological Awareness in Students with Learning Disabilities

PubMed Central

Romero, Ana Carla Leite; Funayama, Carolina Araújo Rodrigues; Capellini, Simone Aparecida; Frizzo, Ana Claudia Figueiredo

2015-01-01

Introduction Behavioral tests of auditory processing have been applied in schools and highlight the association between phonological awareness abilities and auditory processing, confirming that low performance on phonological awareness tests may be due to low performance on auditory processing tests. Objective To characterize the auditory middle latency response and the phonological awareness tests and to investigate correlations between responses in a group of children with learning disorders. Methods The study included 25 students with learning disabilities. Phonological awareness and auditory middle latency response were tested with electrodes placed on the left and right hemispheres. The correlation between the measurements was performed using the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. Results There is some correlation between the tests, especially between the Pa component and syllabic awareness, where moderate negative correlation is observed. Conclusion In this study, when phonological awareness subtests were performed, specifically phonemic awareness, the students showed a low score for the age group, although for the objective examination, prolonged Pa latency in the contralateral via was observed. Negative weak to moderate correlation for Pa wave latency was observed, as was positive weak correlation for Na-Pa amplitude. PMID:26491479

On the Validity and Sensitivity of the Phonics Screening Check: Erratum and Further Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gilchrist, James M.; Snowling, Margaret J.

2018-01-01

Duff, Mengoni, Bailey and Snowling ("Journal of Research in Reading," 38: 109-123; 2015) evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of the phonics screening check against two reference standards. This report aims to correct a minor data error in the original article and to present further analysis of the data. The methods used are…

FUNdamentals: A Research-Based, Phonics Tutorial Learn To Read Program. [Educational Kit].

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eller, Jeanie

FUNdamentals puts the "FUN" back in learning for all age groups. FUNdamentals is an intensive, systematic phonics learn-to-read program that helps improve comprehension, spelling, and penmanship. It is designed for use by every age group. Formulated for use with learners from preschool through adult ages, FUNdamentals is the key to…

Benefits of Systematic and Explicit Phonics Instruction with Early Elementary Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Kimberly

2017-01-01

Eighteen students in a Southern Suburban first grade class will participate in this case study. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of Saxon Phonics instruction in increasing reading achievement in elementary students. Students will take part in focus groups where they discuss books they read and why they enjoy reading…

A Pleasurable Path to Literacy: Can Steiner Contribute to the Literacy Debate?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burnett, John

2007-01-01

Although the recent publication of the Rose Report appears to draw a line in the sand that privileges synthetic phonics over other methods in the UK, history indicates a pendulum swing of preference between whole-word and phonics since the advent of mass education. Suggesting that the current "victory" for exponents of synthetic phonics…

Helping Children Develop Skills in Phonic Analysis, Sight Vocabulary and Handwriting.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rinder, Susan

A study tested the effectiveness of precision teaching through a summer pilot project involving four male students between the ages of 6 and 7, all of whom had demonstrated some difficulty with basic reading skills. The 6-week program concentrated on those skills most important to emergent readers, namely, phonic analysis, sight vocabulary and…

Teaching Beginning Reading Sounds to Head Start Youngsters.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Von Hilsheimer, Catherine

The effectiveness of the Three Owls Reading Method was tested, using 53 children from a Head Start program. The Three Owls system combines sight, phonic, and linguistic reading methods with movement and touch modes of instruction. After a pretest for phonic letter recognition, the students were matched and assigned to one of two classes in a…

Phonemes: Lexical access and beyond.

PubMed

Kazanina, Nina; Bowers, Jeffrey S; Idsardi, William

2018-04-01

Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties: they are 'segment-sized' (the size of a consonant or vowel) and abstract (a single phoneme may be have different acoustic realisations). Nevertheless, there is a long history of challenging the phoneme hypothesis, with some theorists arguing for differently sized phonological units (e.g. features or syllables) and others rejecting abstract codes in favour of representations that encode detailed acoustic properties of the stimulus. The phoneme hypothesis is the minority view today. We defend the phoneme hypothesis in two complementary ways. First, we show that rejection of phonemes is based on a flawed interpretation of empirical findings. For example, it is commonly argued that the failure to find acoustic invariances for phonemes rules out phonemes. However, the lack of invariance is only a problem on the assumption that speech perception is a bottom-up process. If learned sublexical codes are modified by top-down constraints (which they are), then this argument loses all force. Second, we provide strong positive evidence for phonemes on the basis of linguistic data. Almost all findings that are taken (incorrectly) as evidence against phonemes are based on psycholinguistic studies of single words. However, phonemes were first introduced in linguistics, and the best evidence for phonemes comes from linguistic analyses of complex word forms and sentences. In short, the rejection of phonemes is based on a false analysis and a too-narrow consideration of the relevant data.

Screening Protocol for Early Identification of Brazilian Children at Risk for Dyslexia

PubMed Central

Germano, Giseli D.; César, Alexandra B. P. de C.; Capellini, Simone A.

2017-01-01

Early identification of students at risk of dyslexia has been an educational challenge in the past years. This research had two main goals. First, we aimed to develop a screening protocol for early identification of Brazilian children at risk for dyslexia; second, we aimed to identify the predictive variables of this protocol using Principal Component Analysis. The major step involved in developing this protocol was the selection of variables, which were chosen based on the literature review and linguistic criteria. The screening protocol was composed of seven cognitive-linguistic skills: Letter naming; Phonological Awareness (which comprises the following subtests: Rhyme production, Rhyme identification, Syllabic segmentation, Production of words from a given phoneme, Phonemic Synthesis, and Phonemic analysis); Phonological Working memory, Rapid naming Speed; Silent reading; Reading of words and non-words; and Auditory Comprehension of sentences from pictures. A total of 149 children, aged from 6 years to 6 and 11, of both genders who were enrolled in the 1st grade of elementary public schools were submitted to the screening protocol. Principal Component Analysis revealed four factors, accounting for 64.45% of the variance of the Protocol variables: first factor (“pre-reading”), second factor (“decoding”), third factor (“Reading”), and fourth factor “Auditory processing.” The factors found corroborate those reported in the National and International literature and have been described as early signs of dyslexia and reading problems. PMID:29163246

Phonological awareness and writing skills in children with Down syndrome.

PubMed

Lavra-Pinto, Bárbara de; Lamprecht, Regina Ritter

2010-01-01

Down syndrome, phonological awareness, writing and working memory. to evaluate the phonological awareness of Brazilian children with Down syndrome; to analyze the relationship between the writing hypothesis and the phonological awareness scores of the participants; to compare the performance of children with Down syndrome to that of children with typical development according to the Phonological Awareness: Tool for sequential evaluation (PHONATSE), using the writing hypothesis as a matching criteria; to verify the correlation between the phonological awareness measurements and the phonological working memory. a group of eleven children aged between 7 and 14 years (average: 9 y 10 m) was selected for the study. Phonological awareness was evaluated using the PHONATSE. The phonological working memory was evaluated through an instrument developed by the researcher. all subjects presented measurable levels of phonological awareness through the PHONATSE. The phonological awareness scores and the writing hypothesis presented a significant positive association. The performance of children with Down syndrome was significantly lower than children with typical development who presented the same writing hypothesis. Measurements of phonological awareness and phonological working memory presented significant positive correlations. the phonological awareness of Brazilian children with Down syndrome can be evaluated through the PHONATSE. Syllable awareness improves with literacy, whereas phonemic awareness seems to result from written language learning. The phonological working memory influences the performance of children with Down syndrome in phonological awareness tasks.

Cognitive Predictors of Word and Pseudoword Reading in Spanish First-Grade Children

PubMed Central

González-Valenzuela, María J.; Díaz-Giráldez, Félix; López-Montiel, María D.

2016-01-01

The study examines the individual and combined contribution of several cognitive variables (phonemic awareness, phonological memory, and alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric rapid naming) to word and pseudoword reading ability among first-grade Spanish children. Participants were 116 Spanish-speaking children aged 6 years and without special educational needs, all of whom were attending schools in a medium socioeconomic area. Descriptive/exploratory and bivariate analyses were performed with the data derived from three measures of reading ability (accuracy, speed, and efficiency), and hierarchical multivariate regression models were constructed. In general, the results confirm that, with the exception of non-alphanumeric rapid naming, the cognitive variables studied are predictors of reading performance for words and pseudowords, although their influence differs depending on the reading measures and type of linguistic unit considered. Phonemic awareness, phonological memory, and alphanumeric rapid naming were the best predictors of reading accuracy for words and pseudowords. Variability in the other two measures of reading ability (speed and efficiency) was best explained by alphanumeric rapid naming. These results suggest that reading is a complex skill that depends on different types of cognitive variables according to the age and/or level of the reader, the type of orthography and the type of measure used. Furthermore, they highlight the need to provide instruction in these processes from an early age so as to address or prevent the problems that children may present. PMID:27303336

Type IIB thyroplasty for phonic tics in a pediatric patient with autism spectrum disorder: a case report.

PubMed

Ahmed, Mostafa M; Heckman, W Wesley; Dailey, Seth H

2013-03-01

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are commonly associated with Tourette syndrome (TS). TS is classically associated with tic production. A tic is defined as sudden, brief, involuntary production of movement (motor tics) or sound (phonic tics). Case report. We present a case report of a 14-year-old boy with ASD and vocal tics. Vocal tic frequency was nearly 2000 per day and 90 dB in volume. He presented to our laryngology clinic after multiple failed attempts of pharmacologic management of vocal fold botulinum toxin injection. After evaluation in our clinic, we recommended a lateralization (type IIB) thyroplasty. An autologous cartilage graft from the superior thyroid ala was used and held in place with a bioresorbable mesh. Using 4-0 prolene sutures, the mesh was secured in place. The operation was well tolerated with minimal signs of aspiration, and he was discharged to his home within 48 hours. Six months postoperatively, there was 90% reduction in tic frequency and 50% reduction in intensity. Additionally, he has shown improved ability to converse with his peers, participate in school activities, and even has improved nutritional status. Alteration of laryngeal geometry could serve as an effective site of intervention for intractable phonic tics. Reduction of phonic tic frequency and intensity may also stimulate language development in patients ASD. We also demonstrate additional use of bioresorbable plates in pediatric laryngeal framework surgery. Additional neurophysiologic studies are needed to explore the mechanism by which midline lateralization thyroplasty influences phonic tic generation. Copyright © 2013 The Voice Foundation. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

Morphology of the Nasal Apparatus in Pygmy (Kogia Breviceps) and Dwarf (K. Sima) Sperm Whales.

PubMed

Thornton, Steven W; Mclellan, William A; Rommel, Sentiel A; Dillaman, Richard M; Nowacek, Douglas P; Koopman, Heather N; Pabst, D Ann

2015-07-01

Odontocete echolocation clicks are generated by pneumatically driven phonic lips within the nasal passage, and propagated through specialized structures within the forehead. This study investigated the highly derived echolocation structures of the pygmy (Kogia breviceps) and dwarf (K. sima) sperm whales through careful dissections (N = 18 K. breviceps, 6 K. sima) and histological examinations (N = 5 K. breviceps). This study is the first to show that the entire kogiid sound production and transmission pathway is acted upon by complex facial muscles (likely derivations of the m. maxillonasolabialis). Muscles appear capable of tensing and separating the solitary pair of phonic lips, which would control echolocation click frequencies. The phonic lips are enveloped by the "vocal cap," a morphologically complex, connective tissue structure unique to kogiids. Extensive facial muscles appear to control the position of this structure and its spatial relationship to the phonic lips. The vocal cap's numerous air crypts suggest that it may reflect sounds. Muscles encircling the connective tissue case that surrounds the spermaceti organ may change its shape and/or internal pressure. These actions may influence the acoustic energy transmitted from the phonic lips, through this lipid body, to the melon. Facial and rostral muscles act upon the length of the melon, suggesting that the sound "beam" can be focused as it travels through the melon and into the environment. This study suggests that the kogiid echolocation system is highly tunable. Future acoustic studies are required to test these hypotheses and gain further insight into the kogiid echolocation system. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Foundations of Literacy Development in Children at Familial Risk of Dyslexia.

PubMed

Hulme, Charles; Nash, Hannah M; Gooch, Debbie; Lervåg, Arne; Snowling, Margaret J

2015-12-01

The development of reading skills is underpinned by oral language abilities: Phonological skills appear to have a causal influence on the development of early word-level literacy skills, and reading-comprehension ability depends, in addition to word-level literacy skills, on broader (semantic and syntactic) language skills. Here, we report a longitudinal study of children at familial risk of dyslexia, children with preschool language difficulties, and typically developing control children. Preschool measures of oral language predicted phoneme awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge just before school entry, which in turn predicted word-level literacy skills shortly after school entry. Reading comprehension at 8½ years was predicted by word-level literacy skills at 5½ years and by language skills at 3½ years. These patterns of predictive relationships were similar in both typically developing children and those at risk of literacy difficulties. Our findings underline the importance of oral language skills for the development of both word-level literacy and reading comprehension. © The Author(s) 2015.

Stroop interference associated with efficient reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing.

PubMed

Mano, Quintino R; Williamson, Brady J; Pae, Hye K; Osmon, David C

2016-01-01

The Stroop Color-Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning that elicits intuitions of word reading automaticity. One such intuition is that strong reading skills (i.e., more automatized word reading) play a disruptive role within the test, contributing to Stroop interference. However, evidence has accumulated that challenges this intuition. The present study examined associations among Stroop interference, reading skills (i.e., isolated word identification, grapheme-to-phoneme mapping, phonemic awareness, reading fluency) measured on standardized tests, and orthographic skills measured on experimental computerized tasks. Among university students (N = 152), correlational analyses showed greater Stroop interference to be associated with (a) relatively low scores on all standardized reading tests, and (b) longer response latencies on orthographic tasks. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing predicted unique and significant variance in Stroop interference beyond baseline rapid naming. Results suggest that strong reading skills, including orthographic processing, play a supportive role in resolving Stroop interference.

Policy and Evidence: A Critical Analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check in England

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grundin, Hans U.

2018-01-01

This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC), with special focus on the relationship between the UK Department for Education's policy-making and the evidence considered in the process of developing and evaluating the PSC. The reports from the in-house Standards and Testing Agency and from commissioned…

Why All Teachers of English Should Be Trained To Use the THRASS "Periodic Table of Phonics."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Davies, Alan

At a literacy conference in December 1998, British Prime Minister Tony Blair defined phonics as "the skilled process of teaching children how the 44 sounds in the English language are represented by a letter or group of letters." But 4 years down the track, several recent reports from both national and international bodies continue to…

Pre-Packaging Preschool Literacy: What Drives Early Childhood Teachers to Use Commercially Produced Phonics Programs in Prior to School Settings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campbell, Stacey; Torr, Jane; Cologon, Kathy

2014-01-01

Language-rich environments are key to overall quality in early childhood settings, including frequent child-staff interactions around picture books and dramatic play. In a language-rich environment, explicit teaching of literacy concepts, such as phonics, is embedded in authentic and meaningful situations where alphabet letters and sounds are…

A Pilot Evaluation of the Reading Intervention 'Own-Voice Intensive Phonics'

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gwernan-Jones, Ruth; Macmillan, Philip; Norwich, Brahm

2018-01-01

This paper describes the mixed methodology evaluation of the Own-Voice Intensive Phonics (OVIP) programme with 33 secondary students with persistent literacy difficulties. The evaluation involved a quasi-experimental evaluation in which 33 students in years 7-9 in four schools used OVIP over an 8 week period and were monitored at three times for…

Monitoring Children with Reading Disabilities' Response to Phonics Intervention: Are There Differences between Intervention Aligned and General Skill Progress Monitoring Assessments?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olinghouse, Natalie G.; Lambert, Warren; Compton, Donald L.

2006-01-01

This study investigated whether 2 different progress monitoring assessments differentially predicted growth in reading skills associated with systematic phonics instruction. Oral reading fluency (ORE) was compared with an intervention aligned word list (IAWL) as predictors of growth in untimed and timed decoding and word identification and text…

Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study: A Sensible Approach. The Bill Harp Professional Teachers Library Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Glazer, Susan Mandel

This concise book shares several sensible, logical, and meaningful approaches that guide young children to use the written coding system to read, spell, and make meaning of the English language coding system. The book demonstrates that phonics, spelling, and word study are essential parts of literacy learning. After an introduction, chapters are:…

The Aspects About of Objectively Appraisals of Modeling Gypsum Quality and Composites of Phonic-Absorbent and Orthopedic on Base of Gypsum

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pop, P. A.; Ungur, P. A.; Lazar, L.; Marcu, F.

2009-11-01

The EU Norms about of protection environment, outside and inside ambient, and human health demands has lead at obtain of new materials on the base of airborne material, with high thermo and phonic-absorbent properties, porous and lightweight. The α and β-modeling gypsum plaster quality and lightweight depend on many factors as: fabrication process, granulation, roast temperature, work temperature, environment, additives used, breakage, etc. Also, the objectively appraisal of modeling gypsum quality depends of proper tests methods selection, which are legislated in norms, standards and recommendations. In Romanian Standards SR EN 13279-1/2005 and SR EN 13279-2/2005, adaptable from EU Norms EN 13279-1/2004 and EN 13279-2/2004, the characteristics gypsum family tests are well specification, as: granule-metric analysis, determination of water/plaster ratio, setting time, mechanical characteristics, adhesions and water restrain. For plaster with special use (phonic-absorbent and orthopedic materials, etc.) these determinations are not concluding, being necessary more parameters finding, as: elastic constant, phonic-absorbent coefficient, porosity, working, etc., which is imposed the completion of norms and standards with new determinations.

Phonological awareness and short-term memory in hearing and deaf individuals of different communication backgrounds.

PubMed

Koo, Daniel; Crain, Kelly; LaSasso, Carol; Eden, Guinevere F

2008-12-01

Previous work in deaf populations on phonological coding and working memory, two skills thought to play an important role in the acquisition of written language skills, have focused primarily on signers or did not clearly identify the subjects' native language and communication mode. In the present study, we examined the effect of sensory experience, early language experience, and communication mode on the phonological awareness skills and serial recall of linguistic items in deaf and hearing individuals of different communicative and linguistic backgrounds: hearing nonsigning controls, hearing users of ASL, deaf users of ASL, deaf oral users of English, and deaf users of cued speech. Since many current measures of phonological awareness skills are inappropriate for deaf populations on account of the verbal demands in the stimuli or response, we devised a nonverbal phonological measure that addresses this limitation. The Phoneme Detection Test revealed that deaf cuers and oral users, but not deaf signers, performed as well as their hearing peers when detecting phonemes not transparent in the orthography. The second focus of the study examined short-term memory skills and found that in response to the traditional digit span as well as an experimental visual version, digit-span performance was similar across the three deaf groups, yet deaf subjects' retrieval was lower than that of hearing subjects. Our results support the claim (Bavelier et al., 2006) that lexical items processed in the visual-spatial modality are not as well retained as information processed in the auditory channel. Together these findings show that the relationship between working memory, phonological coding, and reading may not be as tightly interwoven in deaf students as would have been predicted from work conducted in hearing students.

Botulinum toxin for motor and phonic tics in Tourette's syndrome.

PubMed

Pandey, Sanjay; Srivanitchapoom, Prachaya; Kirubakaran, Richard; Berman, Brian D

2018-01-05

Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, or Tourette's syndrome, is defined as the presence of both motor and vocal (phonic) tics for more than 12 months, that manifest before the age of 18 years, in the absence of secondary causes. Treatment of motor and phonic tics is difficult and challenging. To determine the safety and effectiveness of botulinum toxin in treating motor and phonic tics in people with Tourette's syndrome, and to analyse the effect of botulinum toxin on premonitory urge and sensory tics. We searched the Cochrane Movement Disorders Group Trials Register, CENTRAL, MEDLINE, and two trials registers to 25 October 2017. We reviewed reference lists of relevant articles for additional trials. We considered all randomised, controlled, double-blind studies comparing botulinum toxin to placebo or other medications for the treatment of motor and phonic tics in Tourette's syndrome for this review. We sought both parallel group and cross-over studies of children or adults, at any dose, and for any duration. We followed standard Cochrane methods to select studies, assess risk of bias, extract and analyse data. All authors independently abstracted data onto standardized forms; disagreements were resolved by mutual discussion. Only one randomised placebo-controlled, double-blind cross-over study met our selection criteria. In this study, 20 participants with motor tics were enrolled over a three-year recruitment period; 18 (14 of whom had a diagnosis of Tourette's syndrome) completed the study; in total, 21 focal motor tics were treated. Although we considered most bias domains to be at low risk of bias, the study recruited a small number of participants with relatively mild tics and provided limited data for our key outcomes. The effects of botulinum toxin injections on tic frequency, measured by videotape or rated subjectively, and on premonitory urge, are uncertain (very low-quality evidence). The quality of evidence for adverse events following botulinum toxin was very low. Nine people had muscle weakness following the injection, which could have led to unblinding of treatment group assignment. No data were available to evaluate whether botulinum injections led to immunoresistance to botulinum. We are uncertain about botulinum toxin effects in the treatment of focal motor and phonic tics in select cases, as we assessed the quality of the evidence as very low. Additional randomised controlled studies are needed to demonstrate the benefits and harms of botulinum toxin therapy for the treatment of motor and phonic tics in patients with Tourette's syndrome.

Strategic Deployment of Orthographic Knowledge in Phoneme Detection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cutler, Anne; Treiman, Rebecca; van Ooijen, Brit

2010-01-01

The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken-word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realized. Listeners detected…

Effects of Systematic and Strategic Analogy-Based Phonics on Grade 2 Students' Word Reading and Reading Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Thomas G.

2005-01-01

Fifteen regular grade 2 teachers used a set of 150 written lessons that were designed to develop, over the course of a school year, low and normally achieving students' ability to decode by analogy (i.e., to read unknown words using known words). The lessons provided (1) a planned sequence for teaching phonic elements including common spelling…

Alternating verbal fluency performance following bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease.

PubMed

Marshall, D F; Strutt, A M; Williams, A E; Simpson, R K; Jankovic, J; York, M K

2012-12-01

Despite common occurrences of verbal fluency declines following bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD), alternating fluency measures using cued and uncued paradigms have not been evaluated. Twenty-three STN-DBS patients were compared with 20 non-surgical PD patients on a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, including cued and uncued intradimensional (phonemic/phonemic and semantic/semantic) and extradimensional (phonemic/semantic) alternating fluency measures at baseline and 6-month follow-up. STN-DBS patients demonstrated a greater decline on the cued phonemic/phonemic fluency and the uncued phonemic/semantic fluency tasks compared to the PD patients. For STN-DBS patients, verbal learning and information processing speed accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in declines in alternating phonemic/phonemic and phonemic/semantic fluency scores, respectively, whilst only naming was related to uncued phonemic/semantic performance for the PD patients. Both groups were aided by cueing for the extradimensional task at baseline and follow-up, and the PD patients were also aided by cueing for the phonemic/phonemic task on follow-up. These findings suggest that changes in alternating fluency are not related to disease progression alone as STN-DBS patients demonstrated greater declines over time than the PD patients, and this change was related to declines in information processing speed. © 2012 The Author(s) European Journal of Neurology © 2012 EFNS.

The Effects of Using Flashcards with Reading Racetrack to Teach Letter Sounds, Sight Words, and Math Facts to Elementary Students with Learning Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Erbey, Rachel; McLaughlin, T. F.; Derby, K. Mark; Everson, Mary

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to measure the effects of reading racetrack and flashcards when teaching phonics, sight words, and addition facts. The participants for the sight word and phonics portion of this study were two seven-year-old boys in the second grade. Both participants were diagnosed with a learning disability. The third participant…

Implementing a Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Phonics Curriculum That Incorporates Music to Meet the Needs of English Language Learners in the Response to Intervention Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Danielle Denise

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the Sing, Spell, Read, Write (SSRW) phonics curriculum that uses explicit and systematic methods and incorporates music to teach literacy skills implemented as a tier-two reading intervention in the Response to Intervention process to meet the cultural and linguistic needs of English…

Estudio comparativo de los metodos analitico-sintetico y global en el aprendizaje de la lectura (Comparative Study of the Analytical-Synthetical (Phonics) and Global (Sight) Reading Methods).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carbonell de Grompone, Maria A.; And Others

An investigation into the phonics and sight methods of reading instruction being taught in Uruguay schools seeks valid predictions in support of each approach. The study, written in Spanish, examines the progressive reading habits and abilities of 12 first-grade classes. Teachers assigned to teach each method uniformly had equivalent training and…

The importance of correctly characterising the English spelling system when devising and evaluating methods of reading instruction: Comment on Taylor, Davis, and Rastle (2017).

PubMed

Bowers, Jeffrey S; Bowers, Peter N

2018-05-01

Taylor, Davis, and Rastle employed an artificial language learning paradigm to compare phonics and meaning-based approaches to reading instruction. Adults were taught consonant, vowel, and consonant (CVC) words composed of novel letters when the mappings between letters and sounds were completely systematic and the mappings between letters and meaning were completely arbitrary. At test, performance on naming tasks was better following training that emphasised the phonological rather than the semantic mappings, whereas performance on semantic tasks was similar in the two conditions. The authors concluded that these findings support phonics for early reading instruction in English. However, in our view, these conclusions are not justified given that the artificial language mischaracterised both the phonological and semantic mappings in English. Furthermore, the way participants studied the arbitrary letter-meaning correspondences bears little relation to meaning-based strategies used in schools. To compare phonics with meaning-based instruction it must be determined whether phonics is better than alternative forms of instruction that fully exploit the regularities within the semantic route. This is rarely assessed because of a widespread and mistaken assumption that underpins so much basic and applied research, namely, that the main function of spellings is to represent sounds.

Development of the literacy achievement gap: a longitudinal study of kindergarten through third grade.

PubMed

Foster, Wayne A; Miller, Merideth

2007-07-01

The major goal of this study was to specify the developmental trajectories for phonics and early text comprehension skills of children from kindergarten through third grade. Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (N = 12,261) were used in this study. The participants were divided into 3 school readiness groups based on an assessment of literacy skill development at the time of entrance into kindergarten. The different groups were tracked on phonics and text comprehension development through the third grade. Students in the average and high literacy readiness groups achieved high scores in decoding (phonics) by the end of the first grade. Students in the low readiness group did not match these scores until the third grade. Although the phonics gap was essentially closed in the third grade, a second, very significant text comprehension gap was exposed. The 3 readiness groups were analyzed to assess the relative contributions of parent education, income, and kindergarten literacy score to third-grade literacy achievement. The results of this study stress the need for speech-language pathologists to assess emergent literacy skills in their speech and language clients and to include appropriate literacy goals in the treatment regimen as a means for reducing the potential need for identification as learning disabled in reading in the later years of elementary school.

Bilingualism affects audiovisual phoneme identification

PubMed Central

Burfin, Sabine; Pascalis, Olivier; Ruiz Tada, Elisa; Costa, Albert; Savariaux, Christophe; Kandel, Sonia

2014-01-01

We all go through a process of perceptual narrowing for phoneme identification. As we become experts in the languages we hear in our environment we lose the ability to identify phonemes that do not exist in our native phonological inventory. This research examined how linguistic experience—i.e., the exposure to a double phonological code during childhood—affects the visual processes involved in non-native phoneme identification in audiovisual speech perception. We conducted a phoneme identification experiment with bilingual and monolingual adult participants. It was an ABX task involving a Bengali dental-retroflex contrast that does not exist in any of the participants' languages. The phonemes were presented in audiovisual (AV) and audio-only (A) conditions. The results revealed that in the audio-only condition monolinguals and bilinguals had difficulties in discriminating the retroflex non-native phoneme. They were phonologically “deaf” and assimilated it to the dental phoneme that exists in their native languages. In the audiovisual presentation instead, both groups could overcome the phonological deafness for the retroflex non-native phoneme and identify both Bengali phonemes. However, monolinguals were more accurate and responded quicker than bilinguals. This suggests that bilinguals do not use the same processes as monolinguals to decode visual speech. PMID:25374551

Reading and language intervention for children at risk of dyslexia: a randomised controlled trial.

PubMed

Duff, Fiona J; Hulme, Charles; Grainger, Katy; Hardwick, Samantha J; Miles, Jeremy N V; Snowling, Margaret J

2014-11-01

Intervention studies for children at risk of dyslexia have typically been delivered preschool, and show short-term effects on letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, with little transfer to literacy. This randomised controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of a reading and language intervention for 6-year-old children identified by research criteria as being at risk of dyslexia (n = 56), and their school-identified peers (n = 89). An Experimental group received two 9-week blocks of daily intervention delivered by trained teaching assistants; the Control group received 9 weeks of typical classroom instruction, followed by 9 weeks of intervention. Following mixed effects regression models and path analyses, small-to-moderate effects were shown on letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and taught vocabulary. However, these were fragile and short lived, and there was no reliable effect on the primary outcome of word-level reading. This new intervention was theoretically motivated and based on previous successful interventions, yet failed to show reliable effects on language and literacy measures following a rigorous evaluation. We suggest that the intervention may have been too short to yield improvements in oral language; and that literacy instruction in and beyond the classroom may have weakened training effects. We argue that reporting of null results makes an important contribution in terms of raising standards both of trial reporting and educational practice. © 2014 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations

PubMed Central

Creanza, Nicole; Ruhlen, Merritt; Pemberton, Trevor J.; Rosenberg, Noah A.; Feldman, Marcus W.; Ramachandran, Sohini

2015-01-01

Worldwide patterns of genetic variation are driven by human demographic history. Here, we test whether this demographic history has left similar signatures on phonemes—sound units that distinguish meaning between words in languages—to those it has left on genes. We analyze, jointly and in parallel, phoneme inventories from 2,082 worldwide languages and microsatellite polymorphisms from 246 worldwide populations. On a global scale, both genetic distance and phonemic distance between populations are significantly correlated with geographic distance. Geographically close language pairs share significantly more phonemes than distant language pairs, whether or not the languages are closely related. The regional geographic axes of greatest phonemic differentiation correspond to axes of genetic differentiation, suggesting that there is a relationship between human dispersal and linguistic variation. However, the geographic distribution of phoneme inventory sizes does not follow the predictions of a serial founder effect during human expansion out of Africa. Furthermore, although geographically isolated populations lose genetic diversity via genetic drift, phonemes are not subject to drift in the same way: within a given geographic radius, languages that are relatively isolated exhibit more variance in number of phonemes than languages with many neighbors. This finding suggests that relatively isolated languages are more susceptible to phonemic change than languages with many neighbors. Within a language family, phoneme evolution along genetic, geographic, or cognate-based linguistic trees predicts similar ancestral phoneme states to those predicted from ancient sources. More genetic sampling could further elucidate the relative roles of vertical and horizontal transmission in phoneme evolution. PMID:25605893

Bidirectional Relations between Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge in Preschool Revisited: A Growth Curve Analysis of the Relation between Two Code-Related Skills

PubMed Central

Lerner, Matthew D.; Lonigan, Christopher J.

2017-01-01

Despite the importance of phonological awareness for the development of reading in alphabetic languages, little attention has been paid to its developmental origins. In this study, dual-process, latent growth models were used to examine patterns of bidirectional relations between letter knowledge and phonological awareness during preschool. The sample comprised 358 children (mean age = 48.60 months, SD = 7.26). Growth models were used to quantify the unique longitudinal relations between the initial level of each skill and growth in the other skill during the preschool year, after controlling for initial level of the same skill, vocabulary, age, and growth in the code-related skill being used as a predictor. Letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness were bi-directionally related; the initial level of each uniquely predicted growth in the other. Initial letter-sound knowledge and phonological awareness growth were not uniquely related, and vocabulary was not related to growth in phonological awareness. These findings extend the evidence of the relation between letter knowledge and phonological awareness to supra-phonemic tasks, indicating that this bidirectional relation begins at an earlier point in the development of phonological awareness than previously reported. In addition, these findings help to rule out general growth in letter knowledge and phonological awareness as an alternative explanation for the bidirectional relation between these two code-related skills. PMID:26745710

The Effectiveness of a Phonics-Based Early Intervention for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Preschool Children and Its Possible Impact on Reading Skills in Elementary School: A Case Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Ye; Spychala, Heather; Harris, Regina S.; Oetting, Tara L.

2013-01-01

The study explored the effects of a phonics-based early intervention package on the early reading skills of three preschool students who were d/Deaf or hard of hearing who differed in regard to degree of hearing loss, use of amplification, and communication mode. The 40-week intervention (50-week in one case) was delivered through individual and…

Investigating lexical competition and the cost of phonemic restoration.

PubMed

Balling, Laura Winther; Morris, David Jackson; Tøndering, John

2017-12-01

Due to phonemic restoration, listeners can reliably perceive words when a phoneme is replaced with noise. The cost associated with this process was investigated along with the effect of lexical uniqueness on phonemic restoration, using data from a lexical decision experiment where noise replaced phonemes that were either uniqueness points (the phoneme at which a word deviates from all nonrelated words that share the same onset) or phonemes immediately prior to these. A baseline condition was also included with no noise-interrupted stimuli. Results showed a significant cost of phonemic restoration, with 100 ms longer word identification times and a 14% decrease in word identification accuracy for interrupted stimuli compared to the baseline. Regression analysis of response times from the interrupted conditions showed no effect of whether the interrupted phoneme was a uniqueness point, but significant effects for several temporal attributes of the stimuli, including the duration and position of the interrupted segment. These results indicate that uniqueness points are not distinct breakpoints in the cohort reduction that occurs during lexical processing, but that temporal properties of the interrupted stimuli are central to auditory word recognition. These results are interpreted in the context of models of speech perception.

Students' performance in phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading, and writing.

PubMed

Capellini, Simone Aparecida; Lanza, Simone Cristina

2010-01-01

phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading and writing in students with learning difficulties of a municipal public school. to characterize and compare the performance of students from public schools with and without learning difficulties in phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading and writing. participants were 60 students from the 2nd to the 4th grades of municipal public schools divided into 6 groups. Each group was composed by 10 students, being 3 groups of students without learning difficulties and 3 groups with students with learning difficulties. As testing procedure phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, oral reading and writing under dictation assessments were used. the results highlighted the better performance of students with no learning difficulties. Students with learning difficulties presented a higher ratios considering time/speed in rapid naming tasks and, consequently, lower production in activities of phonological awareness and reading and writing, when compared to students without learning difficulties. students with learning difficulties presented deficits when considering the relationship between naming and automatization skills, and among lexical access, visual discrimination, stimulus frequency use and competition in using less time for code naming, i.e. necessary for the phoneme-grapheme conversion process required in the reading and writing alphabetic system like the Portuguese language.

Auditory Phoneme Discrimination in Illiterates: Mismatch Negativity--A Question of Literacy?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaadt, Gesa; Pannekamp, Ann; van der Meer, Elke

2013-01-01

These days, illiteracy is still a major problem. There is empirical evidence that auditory phoneme discrimination is one of the factors contributing to written language acquisition. The current study investigated auditory phoneme discrimination in participants who did not acquire written language sufficiently. Auditory phoneme discrimination was…

Homophone Dominance Modulates the Phonemic-Masking Effect.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berent, Iris; Van Orden, Guy C.

2000-01-01

Finds (1) positive phonemic-masking effects occurred for dominant homophones; (2) null phonemic-masking effects occurred for subordinate homophones; and (3) subordinate homophones were much more likely to be falsely identified as their dominant mate. Suggests the source of these null phonemic-masking is itself a phonology effect. Concludes…

Language structures used by kindergartners with cochlear implants: relationship to phonological awareness, lexical knowledge and hearing loss.

PubMed

Nittrouer, Susan; Sansom, Emily; Low, Keri; Rice, Caitlin; Caldwell-Tarr, Amanda

2014-01-01

Listeners use their knowledge of how language is structured to aid speech recognition in everyday communication. When it comes to children with congenital hearing loss severe enough to warrant cochlear implants (CIs), the question arises of whether these children can acquire the language knowledge needed to aid speech recognition, in spite of only having spectrally degraded signals available to them. That question was addressed in the present study. Specifically, there were three goals: (1) to compare the language structures used by children with CIs to those of children with normal hearing (NH); (2) to assess the amount of variance in the language measures explained by phonological awareness and lexical knowledge; and (3) to assess the amount of variance in the language measures explained by factors related to the hearing loss itself and subsequent treatment. Language samples were obtained and transcribed for 40 children who had just completed kindergarten: 19 with NH and 21 with CIs. Five measures were derived from Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts: (1) mean length of utterance in morphemes, (2) number of conjunctions, excluding and, (3) number of personal pronouns, (4) number of bound morphemes, and (5) number of different words. Measures were also collected on phonological awareness and lexical knowledge. Statistics examined group differences, as well as the amount of variance in the language measures explained by phonological awareness, lexical knowledge, and factors related to hearing loss and its treatment for children with CIs. Mean scores of children with CIs were roughly one standard deviation below those of children with NH on all language measures, including lexical knowledge, matching outcomes of other studies. Mean scores of children with CIs were closer to two standard deviations below those of children with NH on two out of three measures of phonological awareness (specifically those related to phonemic structure). Lexical knowledge explained significant amounts of variance on three language measures, but only one measure of phonological awareness (sensitivity to word-final phonemic structure) explained any significant amount of unique variance beyond that, and on only one language measure (number of bound morphemes). Age at first implant, but no other factors related to hearing loss or its treatment, explained significant amounts of variance on the language measures, as well. In spite of early intervention and advances in implant technology, children with CIs are still delayed in learning language, but grammatical knowledge is less affected than phonological awareness. Because there was little contribution to language development measured for phonological awareness independent of lexical knowledge, it was concluded that children with CIs could benefit from intervention focused specifically on helping them learn language structures, in spite of the likely phonological deficits they experience as a consequence of having degraded inputs.

Teacher Candidates' Mastery of Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondence: Massed versus Distributed Practice in Teacher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sayeski, Kristin L.; Earle, Gentry A.; Eslinger, R. Paige; Whitenton, Jessy N.

2017-01-01

Matching phonemes (speech sounds) to graphemes (letters and letter combinations) is an important aspect of decoding (translating print to speech) and encoding (translating speech to print). Yet, many teacher candidates do not receive explicit training in phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Difficulty with accurate phoneme production and/or lack of…

The Linguistic Affiliation Constraint and Phoneme Recognition in Diglossic Arabic

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor; Levin, Iris; Hende, Nareman; Ziv, Margalit

2011-01-01

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

[Phoneme analysis and phoneme discrimination of juvenile speech therapy school students].

PubMed

Franz, S; Rosanowski, F; Eysholdt, U; Hoppe, U

2011-05-01

Phoneme analysis and phoneme discrimination, important factors in acquiring spoken and written language, have been evaluated in juvenile speech therapy school students. The results have been correlated with the results of a school achievement test. The following questions were of interest: Do students in the lower verbal skill segment show pathological phoneme analysis and phoneme discrimination skills? Do the results of the school achievement test differ from the results by students visiting German "Hauptschule"? How does phoneme analysis and phoneme discrimination performance correlate to other tested parameters? 74 students of a speech therapy school ranging from 7 (th) to 9 (th) grade were examined (ages 12;10-17;04) with the Heidelberg Phoneme Discrimination Test H-LAD and the school achievement test "Prüfsystem für Schul- und Bildungsberatung PSB-R 6-13". Compared to 4 (th) graders the juvenile speech therapy school students showed worse results in the H-LAD test with good differentiation in the lower measuring range. In the PSB-R 6-13 test the examined students did worse compared to students visiting German "Hauptschule" for all grades except 9 (th) grade. Comparing H-LAD and PSB-R 6-13 shows a significant correlation for the sub-tests covering language competence and intelligence but not for the concentration tests. Pathological phoneme analysis and phoneme discrimination skills suggest elevated need for counseling, but this needs to corroborated through additional linguistic parameters and measuring non-verbal intelligence. Further trails are needed in order to clarify whether the results can lead to sophisticated therapy algorithms for educational purposes. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

Dynamic Encoding of Acoustic Features in Neural Responses to Continuous Speech.

PubMed

Khalighinejad, Bahar; Cruzatto da Silva, Guilherme; Mesgarani, Nima

2017-02-22

Humans are unique in their ability to communicate using spoken language. However, it remains unclear how the speech signal is transformed and represented in the brain at different stages of the auditory pathway. In this study, we characterized electroencephalography responses to continuous speech by obtaining the time-locked responses to phoneme instances (phoneme-related potential). We showed that responses to different phoneme categories are organized by phonetic features. We found that each instance of a phoneme in continuous speech produces multiple distinguishable neural responses occurring as early as 50 ms and as late as 400 ms after the phoneme onset. Comparing the patterns of phoneme similarity in the neural responses and the acoustic signals confirms a repetitive appearance of acoustic distinctions of phonemes in the neural data. Analysis of the phonetic and speaker information in neural activations revealed that different time intervals jointly encode the acoustic similarity of both phonetic and speaker categories. These findings provide evidence for a dynamic neural transformation of low-level speech features as they propagate along the auditory pathway, and form an empirical framework to study the representational changes in learning, attention, and speech disorders. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We characterized the properties of evoked neural responses to phoneme instances in continuous speech. We show that each instance of a phoneme in continuous speech produces several observable neural responses at different times occurring as early as 50 ms and as late as 400 ms after the phoneme onset. Each temporal event explicitly encodes the acoustic similarity of phonemes, and linguistic and nonlinguistic information are best represented at different time intervals. Finally, we show a joint encoding of phonetic and speaker information, where the neural representation of speakers is dependent on phoneme category. These findings provide compelling new evidence for dynamic processing of speech sounds in the auditory pathway. Copyright © 2017 Khalighinejad et al.

The effects of phonological awareness of Zulu-speaking children learning to spell in English: a study of cross-language transfer.

PubMed

De Sousa, Diana Soares; Greenop, Kirston; Fry, Jessica

2010-12-01

Emergent bilingual Zulu-English speaking children in South Africa have spoken but no written proficiency in Zulu (L1), yet are required to learn to spell English (L2) via English-only literacy instruction. Little research exists on emergent bilingual's phonological awareness (PA) and spelling development, with no L1 formal literacy instruction. Thus, whether PA in a L1 impacts on literacy acquisition in the L2 remains unclear. Performance on monolingual PA, monolingual and emergent bilingual spelling was compared. In addition, PA and spelling in emergent bilingual Zulu-English speakers was explored to ascertain cross-language transfer relationships. Thirty emergent bilingual Zulu-English and thirty monolingual English children in grade 2 participated. Emergent bilinguals were assessed on Zulu PA, Zulu and English spelling skills. Monolinguals were assessed on English PA and English spelling skills. Emergent bilinguals had more Zulu PA levels related to spelling English tasks than to spelling Zulu tasks, and both Zulu PA and Zulu spelling were positively related to English spelling tasks. Significant differences were found between L1 Zulu and English phoneme and rime PA levels, and L1 English and L2 English spelling tasks. Findings support the language-universal hypothesis that L1 PA is related to spelling across languages in emergent bilinguals. In emergent bilinguals, both Zulu spoken proficiency and English-only literacy instruction influences the underlying repertoire of PA skills used to spell within the L1 and the L2. Rime and phoneme PA and spelling skills in Zulu/English rely on language-specific orthographic knowledge.

Meta-analysis of academic interventions derived from neuropsychological data.

PubMed

Burns, Matthew K; Petersen-Brown, Shawna; Haegele, Katherine; Rodriguez, Megan; Schmitt, Braden; Cooper, Maureen; Clayton, Kate; Hutcheson, Shannon; Conner, Cynthia; Hosp, John; VanDerHeyden, Amanda M

2016-03-01

Several scholars have recommended using data from neuropsychological tests to develop interventions for reading and mathematics. The current study examined the effects of using neuropsychological data within the intervention process with meta-analytic procedures. A total of 1,126 articles were found from an electronic search and compared to inclusion criteria, which resulted in 37 articles that were included in the current study. Each article was coded based on how the data were used (screening-86% or designing interventions-14%), size of the group for which interventions were delivered (small group-45%, individual students-45%, or entire classroom-10%), and type of data collected (cognitive functions-24%, reading fluency-33%, phonemic/phonological awareness-35%, or mixed-8%). A corrected Hedges' g was computed for every study and reported for variables of interest. A Fail-safe N was also computed to determine how many studies with a zero effect would have to be found to change the conclusions. The data resulted in a small effect (g = 0.17) for measures of cognitive functioning, but moderate effects of g = 0.43 and g = 0.48 for measures of reading fluency and phonemic/phonological awareness. There were few studies that examined measures of cognitive functioning within the intervention process. Taken together with previous research, the data do not support the use of cognitive measures to develop interventions but instead favor more direct measures of academic skills (e.g., reading fluency) in a skill-by-treatment interaction. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Can Explicit Training in Cued Speech Improve Phoneme Identification?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rees, R.; Fitzpatrick, C.; Foulkes, J.; Peterson, H.; Newton, C.

2017-01-01

When identifying phonemes in new spoken words, lipreading is an important source of information for many deaf people. Because many groups of phonemes are virtually indistinguishable by sight, deaf people are able to identify about 30% of phonemes when lipreading non-words. Cued speech (CS) is a system of hand shapes and hand positions used…

Hemispheric specialization for language according to grapho-phonemic transformation and gender. A divided visual field experiment.

PubMed

Cousin, Emilie; Perrone, Marcela; Baciu, Monica

2009-04-01

This behavioral study aimed at assessing the effect of two variables on the degree of hemispheric specialization for language. One of them was the grapho-phonemic translation (transformation) (letter-sound mapping) and the other was the participants'gender. The experiment was conducted with healthy volunteers. A divided visual field procedure has been used to perform a phoneme detection task implying either regular (transparent) grapho-phonemic translation (letter-sound mapping consistency) or irregular (non-transparent) grapho-phonemic translation (letter-sound mapping inconsistency). Our results reveal a significant effect of grapho-phonemic translation on the degree of hemispheric dominance for language. The phoneme detection on items with transparent translation (TT) was performed faster than phoneme detection on items with non-transparent translation (NTT). This effect seems to be due to faster identification of TT than NTT when the items were presented in the left visual field (LVF)-right hemisphere (RH). There was no difference between TT and NTT for stimuli presented in the right visual field (RVF)-left hemisphere (LH). This result suggests that grapho-phonemic translation or the degree of transparency can affect the degree of hemispheric specialization, by modulating the right hemisphere activity. With respect to gender, male participants were significantly more lateralized than female participants but no interaction was observed between gender and degree of transparency.

Implementation and Evaluation of Computer-Aided Mandarin Phonemes Training System for Hearing-Impaired Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Hui-Jen; Lay, Yun-Long

2005-01-01

A computer-aided Mandarin phonemes training (CAMPT) system was developed and evaluated for training hearing-impaired students in their pronunciation of Mandarin phonemes. Deaf or hearing-impaired people have difficulty hearing their own voice, hence most of them cannot learn how to speak. Phonemes are the basis for learning to read and speak in…

When Variability Matters More than Meaning: The Effect of Lexical Forms on Use of Phonemic Contrasts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thiessen, Erik D.

2011-01-01

During the first half of the 2nd year of life, infants struggle to use phonemic distinctions in label-object association tasks. Prior experiments have demonstrated that exposure to the phonemes in distinct lexical forms (e.g., /"d"/ and /"t"/ in "daddy" and "tiger", respectively) facilitates infants' use of phonemic contrasts but also that they…

Speaker-independent phoneme recognition with a binaural auditory image model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Francis, Keith Ivan

1997-09-01

This dissertation presents phoneme recognition techniques based on a binaural fusion of outputs of the auditory image model and subsequent azimuth-selective phoneme recognition in a noisy environment. Background information concerning speech variations, phoneme recognition, current binaural fusion techniques and auditory modeling issues is explained. The research is constrained to sources in the frontal azimuthal plane of a simulated listener. A new method based on coincidence detection of neural activity patterns from the auditory image model of Patterson is used for azimuth-selective phoneme recognition. The method is tested in various levels of noise and the results are reported in contrast to binaural fusion methods based on various forms of correlation to demonstrate the potential of coincidence- based binaural phoneme recognition. This method overcomes smearing of fine speech detail typical of correlation based methods. Nevertheless, coincidence is able to measure similarity of left and right inputs and fuse them into useful feature vectors for phoneme recognition in noise.

Influences of spoken word planning on speech recognition.

PubMed

Roelofs, Ardi; Ozdemir, Rebecca; Levelt, Willem J M

2007-09-01

In 4 chronometric experiments, influences of spoken word planning on speech recognition were examined. Participants were shown pictures while hearing a tone or a spoken word presented shortly after picture onset. When a spoken word was presented, participants indicated whether it contained a prespecified phoneme. When the tone was presented, they indicated whether the picture name contained the phoneme (Experiment 1) or they named the picture (Experiment 2). Phoneme monitoring latencies for the spoken words were shorter when the picture name contained the prespecified phoneme compared with when it did not. Priming of phoneme monitoring was also obtained when the phoneme was part of spoken nonwords (Experiment 3). However, no priming of phoneme monitoring was obtained when the pictures required no response in the experiment, regardless of monitoring latency (Experiment 4). These results provide evidence that an internal phonological pathway runs from spoken word planning to speech recognition and that active phonological encoding is a precondition for engaging the pathway. 2007 APA

Reconsidering the role of temporal order in spoken word recognition.

PubMed

Toscano, Joseph C; Anderson, Nathaniel D; McMurray, Bob

2013-10-01

Models of spoken word recognition assume that words are represented as sequences of phonemes. We evaluated this assumption by examining phonemic anadromes, words that share the same phonemes but differ in their order (e.g., sub and bus). Using the visual-world paradigm, we found that listeners show more fixations to anadromes (e.g., sub when bus is the target) than to unrelated words (well) and to words that share the same vowel but not the same set of phonemes (sun). This contrasts with the predictions of existing models and suggests that words are not defined as strict sequences of phonemes.

Realization of time keeping alarming system based on CTI technique

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cai, Cheng-Lin; Dong, Shao-Wu

2003-12-01

An application of CTI (Computer Telephone Integration) technique to fault alarming in time keeping system is presented in this paper. Two key parts of this alarming system, telephone phonic card and TTS (Text To Speech) are briefly introduced. A series of events and methods for programming interface based on ActiveX control (phonic.OCX) is discussed, and an alarming program module is developed. The alarming program module can be used in reporting accidents for time keeping system, and can also be applied to power supply system and environmental monitoring system.

Subliminal repetition primes help detection of phonemes in a picture: Evidence for a phonological level of the priming effects.

PubMed

Manoiloff, Laura; Segui, Juan; Hallé, Pierre

2016-01-01

In this research, we combine a cross-form word-picture visual masked priming procedure with an internal phoneme monitoring task to examine repetition priming effects. In this paradigm, participants have to respond to pictures whose names begin with a prespecified target phoneme. This task unambiguously requires retrieving the word-form of the target picture's name and implicitly orients participants' attention towards a phonological level of representation. The experiments were conducted within Spanish, whose highly transparent orthography presumably promotes fast and automatic phonological recoding of subliminal, masked visual word primes. Experiments 1 and 2 show that repetition primes speed up internal phoneme monitoring in the target, compared to primes beginning with a different phoneme from the target, or sharing only their first phoneme with the target. This suggests that repetition primes preactivate the phonological code of the entire target picture's name, hereby speeding up internal monitoring, which is necessarily based on such a code. To further qualify the nature of the phonological code underlying internal phoneme monitoring, a concurrent articulation task was used in Experiment 3. This task did not affect the repetition priming effect. We propose that internal phoneme monitoring is based on an abstract phonological code, prior to its translation into articulation.

How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords With Final Consonant Clusters.

PubMed

Shollenbarger, Amy J; Robinson, Gregory C; Taran, Valentina; Choi, Seo-Eun

2017-10-05

This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords. Forty-nine 1st graders met criteria for 2 dialect groups: AAE and MAE. Three conditions were tested in each rhyme and segmentation task: Real Words No Model, Real Words With a Model, and Nonwords With a Model. The AAE group had significantly more responses that rhymed CVCC words with consonant-vowel-consonant words and segmented CVCC words as consonant-vowel-consonant than the MAE group across all experimental conditions. In the rhyming task, the presence of a model in the real word condition elicited more reduced final cluster responses for both groups. In the segmentation task, the MAE group was at ceiling, so only the AAE group changed across the different stimulus presentations and reduced the final cluster less often when given a model. Rhyming and phoneme segmentation performance can be influenced by a child's dialect when CVCC words are used.

Preschool Phonological and Morphological Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors of Early Reading and Spelling Development in Greek.

PubMed

Diamanti, Vassiliki; Mouzaki, Angeliki; Ralli, Asimina; Antoniou, Faye; Papaioannou, Sofia; Protopapas, Athanassios

2017-01-01

Different language skills are considered fundamental for successful reading and spelling acquisition. Extensive evidence has highlighted the central role of phonological awareness in early literacy experiences. However, many orthographic systems also require the contribution of morphological awareness. The goal of this study was to examine the morphological and phonological awareness skills of preschool children as longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling ability by the end of first grade, controlling for the effects of receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. At Time 1 preschool children from kindergartens in the Greek regions of Attika, Crete, Macedonia, and Thessaly were assessed on tasks tapping receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme), and morphological awareness (inflectional and derivational). Tasks were administered through an Android application for mobile devices (tablets) featuring automatic application of ceiling rules. At Time 2 one year later the same children attending first grade were assessed on measures of word and pseudoword reading, text reading fluency, text reading comprehension, and spelling. Complete data from 104 children are available. Hierarchical linear regression and commonality analyses were conducted for each outcome variable. Reading accuracy for both words and pseudowords was predicted not only by phonological awareness, as expected, but also by morphological awareness, suggesting that understanding the functional role of word parts supports the developing phonology-orthography mappings. However, only phonological awareness predicted text reading fluency at this age. Longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by both receptive vocabulary and morphological awareness was already evident at this age, as expected. Finally, spelling was predicted by preschool phonological awareness, as expected, as well as by morphological awareness, the contribution of which is expected to increase due to the spelling demands of Greek inflectional and derivational suffixes introduced at later grades.

Fully optimized discrimination of physiological responses to auditory stimuli

PubMed Central

Kruglikov, Stepan Y; Chari, Sharmila; Rapp, Paul E; Weinstein, Steven L; Given, Barbara K; Schiff, Steven J

2008-01-01

The use of multivariate measurements to characterize brain activity (electrical, magnetic, optical) is widespread. The most common approaches to reduce the complexity of such observations include principal and independent component analyses (PCA and ICA), which are not well suited for discrimination tasks. We addressed two questions: first, how do the neurophysiological responses to elongated phonemes relate to tone and phoneme responses in normal children, and, second, how discriminable are these responses. We employed fully optimized linear discrimination analysis to maximally separate the multi-electrode responses to tones and phonemes, and classified the response to elongated phonemes. We find that discrimination between tones and phonemes is dependent upon responses from associative regions of the brain apparently distinct from the primary sensory cortices typically emphasized by PCA or ICA, and that the neuronal correlates corresponding to elongated phonemes are highly variable in normal children (about half respond with neural correlates of tones and half as phonemes). Our approach is made feasible by the increase in computational power of ordinary personal computers and has significant advantages for a wide range of neuronal imaging modalities. PMID:18430975

Cerebral responses to across- and within-category change of vowel durations measured by near-infrared spectroscopy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Minagawa-Kawai, Yasuyo; Mori, Koichi; Furuya, Izumi; Hayashi, Ryoko; Sato, Yutaka

2002-05-01

The present study examined cerebral responses to phoneme categories, using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) by measuring the concentration and oxygenation of hemoglobin accompanying local brain activities. Targeted phonemes used here are Japanese long and short vowel categories realized only by durational differences. Results of NIRS and behavioral test revealed NIRS could capture phoneme-specific information. The left side of the auditory area showed large hemodynamic changes only for contrasting stimuli between which phonemic boundary was estimated (across-category condition), but not for stimuli differing by an equal duration but belonging to the same phoneme category (within-category condition). Left dominance in phoneme processing was also confirmed for the across-category stimuli. These findings indicate that the Japanese vowel contrast based only on duration is dealt with in the same language-dominant hemisphere as the other phonemic categories as studied with MEG and PET, and that the cortical activities related to its processing can be detected with NIRS. [Work supported by Japan Society for Promotion of Science (No. 8484) and a grant from Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan.

A Comprehensive Review of Tourette Syndrome and Complementary Alternative Medicine.

PubMed

Kumar, Ashutosh; Duda, L; Mainali, G; Asghar, S; Byler, D

2018-01-01

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neuropsychiatric condition defined by both motor and phonic tics over a period of at least 1 year with the onset before 18 years of age. The purpose of this article is to review the use of complementary alternative medicine (CAM) in children and adults with Tourette syndrome with emphasis on recent research. Most patients do not tell their physician about the use of CAM unless if specifically asked. Of the studies reviewed, description of the treatment and the frequency of use were most often reported. Few studies examine the role or effectiveness of CAM in the treatment of TS specifically. Practitioners should be aware of current research regarding various CAM modalities used for TS patients, including efficacy, potential adverse effects, and interactions with medications. Robust data about the use of CAM, efficacy, and potential side effects is lacking and requires further research to clarify optimal use.

Assessment of Arabic phonological awareness and its relation to word reading ability.

PubMed

Abou-Elsaad, Tamer; Ali, Rawhia; Abd El-Hamid, Haidy

2016-12-01

Phonological awareness (PA) is one of the most important components in the development of normal reading ability. It refers to the ability to detect and manipulate the sound structure of words independently of their meaning. The current study aimed to assess Arabic PA skills and the relation to word reading abilities in Egyptian Arabic-speaking children. The designed assessment was applied to 80 typically developing children, divided into two subgroups ranging in age from 5 years 6 months to 8 years 6 months. The design of assessment involved six PA tasks covering three levels: rhyme awareness, syllabic awareness, and phonemic awareness, as well as the assessment of reading abilities that include real word and nonsense word reading tasks. Descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation), Student's t tests, and Pearson correlation coefficient tests were used to analyze the data. The reliability of the test was proven using the test-retest procedure. Validity of the test was estimated through internal consistency validity. The results revealed that the Arabic PA assessment test (APAAT) proved to be a reliable and valid tool for assessing Arabic reading skills. Findings from the study provided important insights into the developmental patterns of Arabic PA. In addition, the findings revealed a strong relationship between phonological awareness skills and the proficiency in word reading abilities in Arabic school-aged children.

Late-Onset Psychogenic Chronic Phonic-Tics.

PubMed

Vale, Thiago Cardoso; Pedroso, José Luiz; Knobel, Marcos; Knobel, Elias

2016-01-01

Tics beginning in late adulthood often have an identifiable etiology. Psychogenic tics with onset around 60 years of age are rarely described in the literature. A 67-year-old female had experienced phonic tics for 8 years. Episodes occurred without premonitory sensations and precipitant factors, and she could not suppress them. She had no history of childhood tic disorder, and secondary causes of tics were excluded. She was diagnosed with psychogenic tics and treated with quetiapine with mild improvement. When physicians are faced with no identifiable cause of tics combined with certain clinical clues, a psychogenic disorder must be suspected.

(abstract) Synthesis of Speaker Facial Movements to Match Selected Speech Sequences

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Scott, Kenneth C.

1994-01-01

We are developing a system for synthesizing image sequences the simulate the facial motion of a speaker. To perform this synthesis, we are pursuing two major areas of effort. We are developing the necessary computer graphics technology to synthesize a realistic image sequence of a person speaking selected speech sequences. Next, we are developing a model that expresses the relation between spoken phonemes and face/mouth shape. A subject is video taped speaking an arbitrary text that contains expression of the full list of desired database phonemes. The subject is video taped from the front speaking normally, recording both audio and video detail simultaneously. Using the audio track, we identify the specific video frames on the tape relating to each spoken phoneme. From this range we digitize the video frame which represents the extreme of mouth motion/shape. Thus, we construct a database of images of face/mouth shape related to spoken phonemes. A selected audio speech sequence is recorded which is the basis for synthesizing a matching video sequence; the speaker need not be the same as used for constructing the database. The audio sequence is analyzed to determine the spoken phoneme sequence and the relative timing of the enunciation of those phonemes. Synthesizing an image sequence corresponding to the spoken phoneme sequence is accomplished using a graphics technique known as morphing. Image sequence keyframes necessary for this processing are based on the spoken phoneme sequence and timing. We have been successful in synthesizing the facial motion of a native English speaker for a small set of arbitrary speech segments. Our future work will focus on advancement of the face shape/phoneme model and independent control of facial features.

Functions of graphemic and phonemic codes in visual word-recognition.

PubMed

Meyer, D E; Schvaneveldt, R W; Ruddy, M G

1974-03-01

Previous investigators have argued that printed words are recognized directly from visual representations and/or phonological representations obtained through phonemic recoding. The present research tested these hypotheses by manipulating graphemic and phonemic relations within various pairs of letter strings. Ss in two experiments classified the pairs as words or nonwords. Reaction times and error rates were relatively small for word pairs (e.g., BRIBE-TRIBE) that were both graphemically, and phonemically similar. Graphemic similarity alone inhibited performance on other word pairs (e.g., COUCH-TOUCH). These and other results suggest that phonological representations play a significant role in visual word recognition and that there is a dependence between successive phonemic-encoding operations. An encoding-bias model is proposed to explain the data.

Assessing Specific Grapho-Phonemic Skills in Elementary Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robbins, Kelly P.; Hosp, John L.; Hosp, Michelle K.; Flynn, Lindsay J.

2010-01-01

This study examines the relation between decoding and spelling performance on tasks that represent identical specific grapho-phonemic patterns. Elementary students (N = 206) were administered a 597 pseudoword decoding inventory representing 12 specific grapho-phonemic patterns and a 104 real-word spelling inventory representing identical…

Analyzing Distributional Learning of Phonemic Categories in Unsupervised Deep Neural Networks

PubMed Central

Räsänen, Okko; Nagamine, Tasha; Mesgarani, Nima

2017-01-01

Infants’ speech perception adapts to the phonemic categories of their native language, a process assumed to be driven by the distributional properties of speech. This study investigates whether deep neural networks (DNNs), the current state-of-the-art in distributional feature learning, are capable of learning phoneme-like representations of speech in an unsupervised manner. We trained DNNs with unlabeled and labeled speech and analyzed the activations of each layer with respect to the phones in the input segments. The analyses reveal that the emergence of phonemic invariance in DNNs is dependent on the availability of phonemic labeling of the input during the training. No increased phonemic selectivity of the hidden layers was observed in the purely unsupervised networks despite successful learning of low-dimensional representations for speech. This suggests that additional learning constraints or more sophisticated models are needed to account for the emergence of phone-like categories in distributional learning operating on natural speech. PMID:29359204

Varying acoustic-phonemic ambiguity reveals that talker normalization is obligatory in speech processing.

PubMed

Choi, Ja Young; Hu, Elly R; Perrachione, Tyler K

2018-04-01

The nondeterministic relationship between speech acoustics and abstract phonemic representations imposes a challenge for listeners to maintain perceptual constancy despite the highly variable acoustic realization of speech. Talker normalization facilitates speech processing by reducing the degrees of freedom for mapping between encountered speech and phonemic representations. While this process has been proposed to facilitate the perception of ambiguous speech sounds, it is currently unknown whether talker normalization is affected by the degree of potential ambiguity in acoustic-phonemic mapping. We explored the effects of talker normalization on speech processing in a series of speeded classification paradigms, parametrically manipulating the potential for inconsistent acoustic-phonemic relationships across talkers for both consonants and vowels. Listeners identified words with varying potential acoustic-phonemic ambiguity across talkers (e.g., beet/boat vs. boot/boat) spoken by single or mixed talkers. Auditory categorization of words was always slower when listening to mixed talkers compared to a single talker, even when there was no potential acoustic ambiguity between target sounds. Moreover, the processing cost imposed by mixed talkers was greatest when words had the most potential acoustic-phonemic overlap across talkers. Models of acoustic dissimilarity between target speech sounds did not account for the pattern of results. These results suggest (a) that talker normalization incurs the greatest processing cost when disambiguating highly confusable sounds and (b) that talker normalization appears to be an obligatory component of speech perception, taking place even when the acoustic-phonemic relationships across sounds are unambiguous.

Cortical Responses to Chinese Phonemes in Preschoolers Predict Their Literacy Skills at School Age.

PubMed

Hong, Tian; Shuai, Lan; Frost, Stephen J; Landi, Nicole; Pugh, Kenneth R; Shu, Hua

2018-01-01

We investigated whether preschoolers with poor phonological awareness (PA) skills had impaired cortical basis for detecting speech feature, and whether speech perception influences future literacy outcomes in preschoolers. We recorded ERP responses to speech in 52 Chinese preschoolers. The results showed that the poor PA group processed speech changes differentially compared to control group in mismatch negativity (MMN) and late discriminative negativity (LDN). Furthermore, speech perception in kindergarten could predict literacy outcomes after literacy acquisition. These suggest that impairment in detecting speech features occurs before formal reading instruction, and that speech perception plays an important role in reading development.

What Does the Right Hemisphere Know about Phoneme Categories?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wolmetz, Michael; Poeppel, David; Rapp, Brenda

2011-01-01

Innate auditory sensitivities and familiarity with the sounds of language give rise to clear influences of phonemic categories on adult perception of speech. With few exceptions, current models endorse highly left-hemisphere-lateralized mechanisms responsible for the influence of phonemic category on speech perception, based primarily on results…

The Nature of Phoneme Representation in Spoken Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gaskell, M. Gareth; Quinlan, Philip T.; Tamminen, Jakke; Cleland, Alexandra A.

2008-01-01

Four experiments used the psychological refractory period logic to examine whether integration of multiple sources of phonemic information has a decisional locus. All experiments made use of a dual-task paradigm in which participants made forced-choice color categorization (Task 1) and phoneme categorization (Task 2) decisions at varying stimulus…

Teacher candidates' mastery of phoneme-grapheme correspondence: massed versus distributed practice in teacher education.

PubMed

Sayeski, Kristin L; Earle, Gentry A; Eslinger, R Paige; Whitenton, Jessy N

2017-04-01

Matching phonemes (speech sounds) to graphemes (letters and letter combinations) is an important aspect of decoding (translating print to speech) and encoding (translating speech to print). Yet, many teacher candidates do not receive explicit training in phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Difficulty with accurate phoneme production and/or lack of understanding of sound-symbol correspondence can make it challenging for teachers to (a) identify student errors on common assessments and (b) serve as a model for students when teaching beginning reading or providing remedial reading instruction. For students with dyslexia, lack of teacher proficiency in this area is particularly problematic. This study examined differences between two learning conditions (massed and distributed practice) on teacher candidates' development of phoneme-grapheme correspondence knowledge and skills. An experimental, pretest-posttest-delayed test design was employed with teacher candidates (n = 52) to compare a massed practice condition (one, 60-min session) to a distributed practice condition (four, 15-min sessions distributed over 4 weeks) for learning phonemes associated with letters and letter combinations. Participants in the distributed practice condition significantly outperformed participants in the massed practice condition on their ability to correctly produce phonemes associated with different letters and letter combinations. Implications for teacher preparation are discussed.

A coordinate-based ALE functional MRI meta-analysis of brain activation during verbal fluency tasks in healthy control subjects

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background The processing of verbal fluency tasks relies on the coordinated activity of a number of brain areas, particularly in the frontal and temporal lobes of the left hemisphere. Recent studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural networks subserving verbal fluency functions have yielded divergent results especially with respect to a parcellation of the inferior frontal gyrus for phonemic and semantic verbal fluency. We conducted a coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on brain activation during the processing of phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks involving 28 individual studies with 490 healthy volunteers. Results For phonemic as well as for semantic verbal fluency, the most prominent clusters of brain activation were found in the left inferior/middle frontal gyrus (LIFG/MIFG) and the anterior cingulate gyrus. BA 44 was only involved in the processing of phonemic verbal fluency tasks, BA 45 and 47 in the processing of phonemic and semantic fluency tasks. Conclusions Our comparison of brain activation during the execution of either phonemic or semantic verbal fluency tasks revealed evidence for spatially different activation in BA 44, but not other regions of the LIFG/LMFG (BA 9, 45, 47) during phonemic and semantic verbal fluency processing. PMID:24456150

Phonetic basis of phonemic paraphasias in aphasia: Evidence for cascading activation.

PubMed

Kurowski, Kathleen; Blumstein, Sheila E

2016-02-01

Phonemic paraphasias are a common presenting symptom in aphasia and are thought to reflect a deficit in which selecting an incorrect phonemic segment results in the clear-cut substitution of one phonemic segment for another. The current study re-examines the basis of these paraphasias. Seven left hemisphere-damaged aphasics with a range of left hemisphere lesions and clinical diagnoses including Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's aphasia, were asked to produce syllable-initial voiced and voiceless fricative consonants, [z] and [s], in CV syllables followed by one of five vowels [i e a o u] in isolation and in a carrier phrase. Acoustic analyses were conducted focusing on two acoustic parameters signaling voicing in fricative consonants: duration and amplitude properties of the fricative noise. Results show that for all participants, regardless of clinical diagnosis or lesion site, phonemic paraphasias leave an acoustic trace of the original target in the error production. These findings challenge the view that phonemic paraphasias arise from a mis-selection of phonemic units followed by its correct implementation, as traditionally proposed. Rather, they appear to derive from a common mechanism with speech errors reflecting the co-activation of a target and competitor resulting in speech output that has some phonetic properties of both segments. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Strategic deployment of orthographic knowledge in phoneme detection.

PubMed

Cutler, Anne; Treiman, Rebecca; van Ooijen, Brit

2010-01-01

The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken-word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realized. Listeners detected the target sounds [b, m, t, f, s, k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b, m, t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f, s, k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when spelling was rendered salient by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled filler words. Within the inconsistent targets [f, s, k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with more usual (foam, seed, cattle) versus less usual (phone, cede, kettle) spellings. Phoneme detection is thus not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects; knowledge of spelling stored in the lexical representations of words does not automatically become available as word candidates are activated. However, salient orthographic manipulations in experimental input can induce such sensitivity. We attribute this to listeners' experience of the value of spelling in everyday situations that encourage phonemic decisions (such as learning new names).

Comparing the spelling and reading abilities of students with cochlear implants and students with typical hearing.

PubMed

Apel, Kenn; Masterson, Julie J

2015-04-01

The purpose of this study was to determine whether students with and without hearing loss (HL) differed in their spelling abilities and, specifically, in the underlying linguistic awareness skills that support spelling ability. Furthermore, we examined whether there were differences between the two groups in the relationship between reading and spelling. We assessed the spelling, word-level reading, and reading comprehension skills of nine students with cochlear implants and nine students with typical hearing who were matched for reading age. The students' spellings were analyzed to determine whether the misspellings were due to errors with phonemic awareness, orthographic pattern or morphological awareness, or poor mental graphemic representations. The students with HL demonstrated markedly less advanced spelling abilities than the students with typical hearing. For the students with HL, the misspellings were primarily due to deficiencies in orthographic pattern and morphological awareness. Correlations between measures of spelling and both real word reading and reading comprehension were lower for the students with HL. With additional investigations using a similar approach to spelling analysis that captures the underlying causes for spelling errors, researchers will better understand the linguistic awareness abilities that students with HL bring to the task of reading and spelling. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Phonemic Code Dependence Varies with Previous Exposure to Words.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rabin, Jeffrey L.; Zecker, Steven G.

Reading researchers and theorists are sharply divided as to how meaning is obtained from the printed word. Three current explanations are that (1) meaning is accessed directly, without any intermediate processes; (2) meaning is accessed only through an intermediate phonemic stage; and (3) both direct access and phonemic mediation can occur. To…

A REFERENCE GRAMMAR OF ADAMAWA FULANI. AFRICAN LANGUAGE MONOGRAPH NUMBER 8.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

STENNES, LESLIE H.

THIS REFERENCE WORK IS A STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR OF THE ADAMAWA DIALECT OF FULANI AS SPOKEN IN NIGERIA AND CAMEROUN. IT IS PRIMARILY WRITTEN FOR LINGUISTS AND THOSE WHO ALREADY KNOW FULANI. THE GRAMMAR IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS--(1) PHONEMICS AND MORPHOPHONEMICS, DISCUSSING SEGMENTAL AND SUPRASEGMENTAL PHONEMES, PERMITTED SEQUENCES OF PHONEMES,…

Learning Phonemes with a Proto-Lexicon

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, Andrew; Peperkamp, Sharon; Dupoux, Emmanuel

2013-01-01

Before the end of the first year of life, infants begin to lose the ability to perceive distinctions between sounds that are not phonemic in their native language. It is typically assumed that this developmental change reflects the construction of language-specific phoneme categories, but how these categories are learned largely remains a mystery.…

Phonetic, Phonemic, and Phonological Factors in Cross-Language Discrimination of Phonotactic Contrasts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Davidson, Lisa

2011-01-01

Previous research indicates that multiple levels of linguistic information play a role in the perception and discrimination of non-native phonemes. This study examines the interaction of phonetic, phonemic and phonological factors in the discrimination of non-native phonotactic contrasts. Listeners of Catalan, English, and Russian are presented…

Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

PubMed Central

2016-01-01

It has been proposed that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity. Here we present a model that simulates the human range expansion out of Africa and the subsequent spatial linguistic dynamics until today. It does not assume copying errors, Darwinian competition, reduced contrastive possibilities or any other specific linguistic mechanism. We show that the decrease of linguistic diversity with distance (from the presumed origin of the expansion) arises under three assumptions, previously introduced by other authors: (i) an accumulation rate for phonemes; (ii) small phonemic inventories for the languages spoken before the out-of-Africa dispersal; (iii) an increase in the phonemic accumulation rate with the number of speakers per unit area. Numerical simulations show that the predictions of the model agree with the observed decrease of linguistic diversity with increasing distance from the most likely origin of the out-of-Africa dispersal. Thus, the proposal that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity is viable, if three strong assumptions are satisfied. PMID:27122180

Classroom phonological awareness instruction and literacy outcomes in the first year of school.

PubMed

Carson, Karyn L; Gillon, Gail T; Boustead, Therese M

2013-04-01

Despite strong investment in raising literacy achievement for all children, significant inequalities in literacy outcomes continue to exist among some of the world's most advanced economies. This study investigated the influence of a short, intensive period of phonological awareness (PA) instruction implemented by classroom teachers on raising the literacy achievement of children with and without spoken language impairment (SLI). A quasi-experimental design was employed to measure the PA, reading, and spelling development of one hundred twenty-nine 5-year-olds. Thirty-four children received 10 weeks of PA instruction from their teachers. Ninety-five children continued with their usual reading program, which included phonics instruction but did not target PA. Children who received PA instruction demonstrated superior literacy outcomes compared to children who followed the usual literacy curriculum. Children with SLI showed significant improvements in PA, reading, and spelling but had a different pattern of response to instruction compared to children with typical language. Importantly, the number of children experiencing word decoding difficulties at the end of the program was 26% among children who followed the usual literacy curriculum compared to 6% among children who received the PA instruction. A short, intensive period of classroom PA instruction can raise the literacy profiles of children with and without spoken language difficulties.

Phonemic accuracy development in children with cochlear implants up to five years of age by using Levenshtein distance.

PubMed

Faes, Jolien; Gillis, Joris; Gillis, Steven

2016-01-01

Phonemic accuracy of children with cochlear implants (CI) is often reported to be lower in comparison with normally hearing (NH) age-matched children. In this study, we compare phonemic accuracy development in the spontaneous speech of Dutch-speaking children with CI and NH age-matched peers. A dynamic cost model of Levenshtein distance is used to compute the accuracy of each word token. We set up a longitudinal design with monthly data for comparisons up to age two and a cross-sectional design with yearly data between three and five years of age. The main finding is that phonemic accuracy steadily increases throughout the period studied. Children with CI's accuracy is lower than that of their NH age mates, but this difference is not statistically significant in the earliest stages of lexical development. But accuracy of children with CI initially improves significantly less steeply than that of NH peers. Furthermore, the number of syllables in the target word and target word's complexity influence children's accuracy, as longer and more complex target words are less accurately produced. Up to age four, children with CI are significantly less accurate than NH children with increasing word length and word complexity. This difference has disappeared at age five. Finally, hearing age is shown to influence accuracy development of children with CI, while age of implant activation is not. This article informs the reader about phonemic accuracy development in children. The reader will be able to (a) discuss different metrics to measure phonemic accuracy development, (b) discuss phonemic accuracy of children with CI up to five years of age and compare them with NH children, (c) discuss the influence of target word's complexity and target word's syllable length on phonemic accuracy, (d) discuss the influence of hearing experience and age of implantation on phonemic accuracy of children with CI. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phoneme restoration and empirical coverage of interactive activation and adaptive resonance models of human speech processing

PubMed Central

Magnuson, James S.

2015-01-01

Grossberg and Kazerounian [(2011). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, 440–460] present a model of sequence representation for spoken word recognition, the cARTWORD model, which simulates essential aspects of phoneme restoration. Grossberg and Kazerounian also include simulations with the TRACE model presented by McClelland and Elman [(1986). Cognit. Psychol. 18, 1–86] that seem to indicate that TRACE cannot simulate phoneme restoration. Grossberg and Kazerounian also claim cARTWORD should be preferred to TRACE because of TRACE's implausible approach to sequence representation (reduplication of time-specific units) and use of non-modulatory feedback (i.e., without position-specific bottom-up support). This paper responds to Grossberg and Kazerounian first with TRACE simulations that account for phoneme restoration when appropriately constructed noise is used (and with minor changes to TRACE phoneme definitions), then reviews the case for reduplicated units and feedback as implemented in TRACE, as well as TRACE's broad and deep coverage of empirical data. Finally, it is argued that cARTWORD is not comparable to TRACE because cARTWORD cannot represent sequences with repeated elements, has only been implemented with small phoneme and lexical inventories, and has been applied to only one phenomenon (phoneme restoration). Without evidence that cARTWORD captures a similar range and detail of human spoken language processing as alternative models, it is premature to prefer cARTWORD to TRACE. PMID:25786959

Neural Network Classifier Architectures for Phoneme Recognition. CRC Technical Note No. CRC-TN-92-001.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Treurniet, William

A study applied artificial neural networks, trained with the back-propagation learning algorithm, to modelling phonemes extracted from the DARPA TIMIT multi-speaker, continuous speech data base. A number of proposed network architectures were applied to the phoneme classification task, ranging from the simple feedforward multilayer network to more…

Is Sensitivity to Rhyme a Developmental Precursor to Sensitivity to Phoneme?: Evidence from Individuals with Down Syndrome.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cardoso-Martins, Claudia; Michalick, Mirelle Franca; Pollo, Tatiana Cury

2002-01-01

Investigates sensitivity to rhyme and phoneme among readers and nonreaders with Down Syndrome (DS) and normally developing children. Evaluates a rhyme detection task and initial and middle phoneme detection tasks. Concludes the rhyme detection task was the easiest for nonreaders without DS and most difficult for readers with DS. (PM)

Neurophysiological evidence of efference copies to inner speech

PubMed Central

Jack, Bradley N; Pearson, Daniel; Griffiths, Oren; Luque, David; Harris, Anthony WF; Spencer, Kevin M; Le Pelley, Mike E

2017-01-01

Efference copies refer to internal duplicates of movement-producing neural signals. Their primary function is to predict, and often suppress, the sensory consequences of willed movements. Efference copies have been almost exclusively investigated in the context of overt movements. The current electrophysiological study employed a novel design to show that inner speech – the silent production of words in one’s mind – is also associated with an efference copy. Participants produced an inner phoneme at a precisely specified time, at which an audible phoneme was concurrently presented. The production of the inner phoneme resulted in electrophysiological suppression, but only if the content of the inner phoneme matched the content of the audible phoneme. These results demonstrate that inner speech – a purely mental action – is associated with an efference copy with detailed auditory properties. These findings suggest that inner speech may ultimately reflect a special type of overt speech. PMID:29199947

The Emergence of the Allophonic Perception of Unfamiliar Speech Sounds: The Effects of Contextual Distribution and Phonetic Naturalness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Noguchi, Masaki; Hudson Kam, Carla L.

2018-01-01

In human languages, different speech sounds can be contextual variants of a single phoneme, called allophones. Learning which sounds are allophones is an integral part of the acquisition of phonemes. Whether given sounds are separate phonemes or allophones in a listener's language affects speech perception. Listeners tend to be less sensitive to…

Phoneme Restoration Methods Reveal Prosodic Influences on Syntactic Parsing: Data from Bulgarian

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stoyneshka-Raleva, Iglika

2013-01-01

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

Paced Reading in Semantic Dementia: Word Knowledge Contributes to Phoneme Binding in Rapid Speech Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jefferies, Elizabeth; Grogan, John; Mapelli, Cristina; Isella, Valeria

2012-01-01

Patients with semantic dementia (SD) show deficits in phoneme binding in immediate serial recall: when attempting to reproduce a sequence of words that they no longer fully understand, they show frequent migrations of phonemes between items (e.g., cap, frog recalled as "frap, cog"). This suggests that verbal short-term memory emerges directly from…

Microscopic prediction of speech recognition for listeners with normal hearing in noise using an auditory model.

PubMed

Jürgens, Tim; Brand, Thomas

2009-11-01

This study compares the phoneme recognition performance in speech-shaped noise of a microscopic model for speech recognition with the performance of normal-hearing listeners. "Microscopic" is defined in terms of this model twofold. First, the speech recognition rate is predicted on a phoneme-by-phoneme basis. Second, microscopic modeling means that the signal waveforms to be recognized are processed by mimicking elementary parts of human's auditory processing. The model is based on an approach by Holube and Kollmeier [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 1703-1716 (1996)] and consists of a psychoacoustically and physiologically motivated preprocessing and a simple dynamic-time-warp speech recognizer. The model is evaluated while presenting nonsense speech in a closed-set paradigm. Averaged phoneme recognition rates, specific phoneme recognition rates, and phoneme confusions are analyzed. The influence of different perceptual distance measures and of the model's a-priori knowledge is investigated. The results show that human performance can be predicted by this model using an optimal detector, i.e., identical speech waveforms for both training of the recognizer and testing. The best model performance is yielded by distance measures which focus mainly on small perceptual distances and neglect outliers.

Discrimination of phoneme length differences in word and sentence contexts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kawai, Norimune; Carrell, Thomas

2005-09-01

The ability of listeners to discriminate phoneme duration differences within word and sentence contexts was measured. This investigation was part of a series of studies examining the audibility and perceptual importance of speech modifications produced by stuttering intervention techniques. Just noticeable differences (jnd's) of phoneme lengths were measured via the parameter estimation by sequential testing (PEST) task, an adaptive tracking procedure. The target phonemes were digitally manipulated to vary from normal (130 m) to prolonged (210 m) duration in 2-m increments. In the first condition the phonemes were embedded in words. In the second condition the phonemes were embedded within words, which were further embedded in sentences. A four-interval forced-choice (4IAX) task was employed on each trial, and the PEST procedure determined the duration at which each listener correctly detected a difference between the normal duration and the test duration 71% of the time. The results revealed that listeners were able to reliably discriminate approximately 15-m differences in word context and 10-m differences in sentence context. An independent t-test showed a difference in discriminability between word and sentence contexts to be significant. These results indicate that duration differences were better perceived within a sentence context.

Small wins big: analytic pinyin skills promote Chinese word reading.

PubMed

Lin, Dan; McBride-Chang, Catherine; Shu, Hua; Zhang, Yuping; Li, Hong; Zhang, Juan; Aram, Dorit; Levin, Iris

2010-08-01

The present study examined invented spelling of pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching and learning Chinese words) in relation to subsequent Chinese reading development. Among 296 Chinese kindergartners in Beijing, independent invented pinyin spelling was found to be uniquely predictive of Chinese word reading 12 months later, even with Time 1 syllable deletion, phoneme deletion, and letter knowledge, in addition to the autoregressive effects of Time 1 Chinese word reading, statistically controlled. These results underscore the importance of children's early pinyin representations for Chinese reading acquisition, both theoretically and practically. The findings further support the idea of a universal phonological principle and indicate that pinyin is potentially an ideal measure of phonological awareness in Chinese.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Two Theoretically Motivated Computer-Assisted Reading Interventions in the United Kingdom: GG Rime and GG Phoneme

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kyle, Fiona; Kujala, Janne; Richardson, Ulla; Lyytinen, Heikki; Goswami, Usha

2013-01-01

We report an empirical comparison of the effectiveness of two theoretically motivated computer-assisted reading interventions (CARI) based on the Finnish GraphoGame CARI: English GraphoGame Rime (GG Rime) and English GraphoGame Phoneme (GG Phoneme). Participants were 6-7-year-old students who had been identified by their teachers as being…

Analysis of Phonemes, Graphemes, Onset-Rimes, and Words with Braille-Learning Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crawford, Shauna; Elliott, Robert T.

2007-01-01

Six primary school-aged braille students were taught to name 4 to 10 braille letters as phonemes and another 4 to 10 braille letters as graphemes (Study 1). They were then taught to name 10 braille words as onset-rimes and another 10 braille words as whole words (Study 2). Instruction in phonemes and onset rimes resulted in fewer trials and a…

The relationship between articulatory control and improved phonemic accuracy in childhood apraxia of speech: A longitudinal case study

PubMed Central

Grigos, Maria I.; Kolenda, Nicole

2010-01-01

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to study jaw duration, displacement, velocity, and stability. A transcription analysis determined the percentage of phoneme errors and consistency. Results showed phoneme-specific changes which included increases in jaw velocity and stability over time, as well as decreases in duration. Kinematic parameters became more similar to patterns seen in the controls during final sessions where tokens were produced most accurately and consistently. Closing velocity and stability, however, were the only measures to fall within a 95% confidence interval established for the controls across all three target phonemes. These findings suggest that motor processes may differ between children with CAS and their typically developing peers. PMID:20030551

How do associative and phonemic overlap interact to boost illusory recollection?

PubMed

Hutchison, Keith A; Meade, Michelle L; Williams, Nikolas S; Manley, Krista D; McNabb, Jaimie C

2018-05-01

This project investigated the underlying mechanisms that boost false remember responses when participants receive study words that are both semantically and phonologically similar to a critical lure. Participants completed a memory task in which they were presented with a list of words all associated with a critical lure. Included within the list of semantic associates was a target that was either semantically associated (e.g., yawn) to the critical lure (e.g., sleep) or shared the initial (e.g., slam) or final (e.g., beep) phoneme(s) with the critical lure. After hearing the list, participants recalled each list item and indicated whether they just knew it was on the list or if they instead recollected specific contextual details of that item's presentation. We found that inserting an initial phonemic overlap target boosted experiences of recollection, but only when semantically related associates were presented beforehand. The results are consistent with models of spoken word recognition and show that established semantic context plus initial phonemic overlap play important roles in boosting false recollection.

Conditioned allophony in speech perception: an ERP study.

PubMed

Miglietta, Sandra; Grimaldi, Mirko; Calabrese, Andrea

2013-09-01

A Mismatch Negativity (MMN) study was performed to investigate whether pre-attentive vowel perception is influenced by phonological status. We compared the MMN response to the acoustic distinction between the allophonic variation [ε-e] and phonemic contrast [e-i] present in a Southern-Italian variety (Tricase dialect). Clear MMNs were elicited for both the phonemic and allophonic conditions. Interestingly, a shorter latency was observed for the phonemic pair, but no significant amplitude difference was observed between the two conditions. Together, these results suggest that for isolated vowels, the phonological status of a vowel category is reflected in the latency of the MMN peak. The earlier latency of the phonemic condition argues for an easier parsing and encoding of phonemic contrasts in memory representations. Thus, neural computations mapping auditory inputs into higher perceptual representations seem 'sensitive' to the contrastive/non-contrastive status of the sounds as determined by the listeners' knowledge of the own phonological system. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Adapted cuing technique: facilitating sequential phoneme production.

PubMed

Klick, S L

1994-09-01

ACT is a visual cuing technique designed to facilitate dyspraxic speech by highlighting the sequential production of phonemes. In using ACT, cues are presented in such a way as to suggest sequential, coarticulatory movement in an overall pattern of motion. While using ACT, the facilitator's hand moves forward and back along the side of her (or his) own face. Finger movements signal specific speech sounds in formations loosely based on the manual alphabet for the hearing impaired. The best movements suggest the flowing, interactive nature of coarticulated phonemes. The synergistic nature of speech is suggested by coordinated hand motions which tighten and relax, move quickly or slowly, reflecting the motions of the vocal tract at various points during production of phonemic sequences. General principles involved in using ACT include a primary focus on speech-in-motion, the monitoring and fading of cues, and the presentation of stimuli based on motor-task analysis of phonemic sequences. Phonemic sequences are cued along three dimensions: place, manner, and vowel-related mandibular motion. Cuing vowels is a central feature of ACT. Two parameters of vowel production, focal point of resonance and mandibular closure, are cued. The facilitator's hand motions reflect the changing shape of the vocal tract and the trajectory of the tongue that result from the coarticulation of vowels and consonants. Rigid presentation of the phonemes is secondary to the facilitator's primary focus on presenting the overall sequential movement. The facilitator's goal is to self-tailor ACT in response to the changing needs and abilities of the client.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Voice intelligibility in satellite mobile communications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wishna, S.

1973-01-01

An amplitude control technique is reported that equalizes low level phonemes in a satellite narrow band FM voice communication system over channels having low carrier to noise ratios. This method presents at the transmitter equal amplitude phonemes so that the low level phonemes, when they are transmitted over the noisey channel, are above the noise and contribute to output intelligibility. The amplitude control technique provides also for squelching of noise when speech is not being transmitted.

Automatic Recognition of Phonemes Using a Syntactic Processor for Error Correction.

DTIC Science & Technology

1980-12-01

OF PHONEMES USING A SYNTACTIC PROCESSOR FOR ERROR CORRECTION THESIS AFIT/GE/EE/8D-45 Robert B. ’Taylor 2Lt USAF Approved for public release...distribution unlimilted. AbP AFIT/GE/EE/ 80D-45 AUTOMATIC RECOGNITION OF PHONEMES USING A SYNTACTIC PROCESSOR FOR ERROR CORRECTION THESIS Presented to the...Testing ..................... 37 Bayes Decision Rule for Minimum Error ........... 37 Bayes Decision Rule for Minimum Risk ............ 39 Mini Max Test

Stochastic Model for Phonemes Uncovers an Author-Dependency of Their Usage.

PubMed

Deng, Weibing; Allahverdyan, Armen E

2016-01-01

We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical mechanics. This description allows us to demonstrate that the rank-frequency relations for phonemes of a text do depend on its author. The author-dependency effect is not caused by the author's vocabulary (common words used in different texts), and is confirmed by several alternative means. This suggests that it can be directly related to phonemes. These features contrast to rank-frequency relations for words, which are both author and text independent and are governed by the Zipf's law.

The absoluteness of semantic processing: lessons from the analysis of temporal clusters in phonemic verbal fluency.

PubMed

Vonberg, Isabelle; Ehlen, Felicitas; Fromm, Ortwin; Klostermann, Fabian

2014-01-01

For word production, we may consciously pursue semantic or phonological search strategies, but it is uncertain whether we can retrieve the different aspects of lexical information independently from each other. We therefore studied the spread of semantic information into words produced under exclusively phonemic task demands. 42 subjects participated in a letter verbal fluency task, demanding the production of as many s-words as possible in two minutes. Based on curve fittings for the time courses of word production, output spurts (temporal clusters) considered to reflect rapid lexical retrieval based on automatic activation spread, were identified. Semantic and phonemic word relatedness within versus between these clusters was assessed by respective scores (0 meaning no relation, 4 maximum relation). Subjects produced 27.5 (±9.4) words belonging to 6.7 (±2.4) clusters. Both phonemically and semantically words were more related within clusters than between clusters (phon: 0.33±0.22 vs. 0.19±0.17, p<.01; sem: 0.65±0.29 vs. 0.37±0.29, p<.01). Whereas the extent of phonemic relatedness correlated with high task performance, the contrary was the case for the extent of semantic relatedness. The results indicate that semantic information spread occurs, even if the consciously pursued word search strategy is purely phonological. This, together with the negative correlation between semantic relatedness and verbal output suits the idea of a semantic default mode of lexical search, acting against rapid task performance in the given scenario of phonemic verbal fluency. The simultaneity of enhanced semantic and phonemic word relatedness within the same temporal cluster boundaries suggests an interaction between content and sound-related information whenever a new semantic field has been opened.

Enhanced neural and behavioural processing of a nonnative phonemic contrast in professional musicians.

PubMed

Dittinger, Eva; D'Imperio, Mariapaola; Besson, Mireille

2018-05-12

Based on growing evidence suggesting that professional music training facilitates foreign language perception and learning, we examined the impact of musical expertise on the categorisation of syllables including phonemes that did (/p/, /b/) or did not (/p h /) belong to the French repertoire by analysing both behaviour (error rates and reaction times) and Event-Related brain Potentials (N200 and P300 components). Professional musicians and nonmusicians categorised syllables either as /ba/ or /pa/ (voicing task), or as /pa/ or /p h a/ with /p h / being a nonnative phoneme for French speakers (aspiration task). In line with our hypotheses, results showed that musicians outperformed nonmusicians in the aspiration task but not in the voicing task. Moreover, the difference between the native (/p/) and the nonnative phoneme (/p h /), as reflected in N200 and P300 amplitudes, was larger in musicians than in nonmusicians in the aspiration task but not in the voicing task. These results show that behaviour and brain activity associated to nonnative phoneme perception are influenced by musical expertise and that these effects are task-dependent. The implications of these findings for current models of phoneme perception and for understanding the qualitative and quantitative differences found on the N200 and P300 components are discussed. © 2018 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Emotion to emotion speech conversion in phoneme level

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bulut, Murtaza; Yildirim, Serdar; Busso, Carlos; Lee, Chul Min; Kazemzadeh, Ebrahim; Lee, Sungbok; Narayanan, Shrikanth

2004-10-01

Having an ability to synthesize emotional speech can make human-machine interaction more natural in spoken dialogue management. This study investigates the effectiveness of prosodic and spectral modification in phoneme level on emotion-to-emotion speech conversion. The prosody modification is performed with the TD-PSOLA algorithm (Moulines and Charpentier, 1990). We also transform the spectral envelopes of source phonemes to match those of target phonemes using LPC-based spectral transformation approach (Kain, 2001). Prosodic speech parameters (F0, duration, and energy) for target phonemes are estimated from the statistics obtained from the analysis of an emotional speech database of happy, angry, sad, and neutral utterances collected from actors. Listening experiments conducted with native American English speakers indicate that the modification of prosody only or spectrum only is not sufficient to elicit targeted emotions. The simultaneous modification of both prosody and spectrum results in higher acceptance rates of target emotions, suggesting that not only modeling speech prosody but also modeling spectral patterns that reflect underlying speech articulations are equally important to synthesize emotional speech with good quality. We are investigating suprasegmental level modifications for further improvement in speech quality and expressiveness.

The interface between spoken and written language: developmental disorders.

PubMed

Hulme, Charles; Snowling, Margaret J

2014-01-01

We review current knowledge about reading development and the origins of difficulties in learning to read. We distinguish between the processes involved in learning to decode print, and the processes involved in reading for meaning (reading comprehension). At a cognitive level, difficulties in learning to read appear to be predominantly caused by deficits in underlying oral language skills. The development of decoding skills appears to depend critically upon phonological language skills, and variations in phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and rapid automatized naming each appear to be causally related to problems in learning to read. Reading comprehension difficulties in contrast appear to be critically dependent on a range of oral language comprehension skills (including vocabulary knowledge and grammatical, morphological and pragmatic skills).

Zipf’s Law and the Frequency of Kazak Phonemes in Word Formation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xin, Ruiqing; Li, Yonghong; Yu, Hongzhi

2018-03-01

Zipf’s Law is the basis of the principle of Least Effort, and is widely applicable in all natural fields. The occurring frequency of each phoneme in all Kazak words has been counted to testify the application of Zipf’s law in Kazak. Due to the limitation of the sample size, deviation is unavoidable, but overall results indicate that the occurring frequency and the reciprocal rank of each phoneme in Kazak words formation are in line with Zipf’s distribution.

Spelling Processes of Children With Nonsyndromic Cleft Lip and/or Palate: A Preliminary Study.

PubMed

Lee, Karen Shi Mei; Young, Selena Ee-Li; Liow, Susan Jane Rickard; Purcell, Alison Anne

2015-01-01

Objective :  To compare the cognitive-linguistic processes underlying spelling performance of children with cleft lip and/or palate with those of typically developing children. Design :  An assessment battery including tests of hearing, articulation, verbal short-term and working memory, and phonological awareness, as well as word and nonword spelling, was administered to both groups. Participants :  A total of 15 children with nonsyndromic cleft lip and/or palate were case-matched by age and sex to 15 typically developing children. The children were aged between 6 and 8 years and were bilingual, with English the dominant language. Results :  Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed that the performance of children with cleft lip and/or palate was significantly poorer on phoneme deletion and nonword spelling (P < .05) compared with typically developing children. Spearman correlation analyses revealed different relationships between the cognitive-linguistic and spelling measures for the cleft lip and/or palate and typically developing groups. Conclusions :  Children with cleft lip and/or palate underachieve in phonological awareness and spelling skills. To facilitate early intervention for literacy problems, speech-language pathologists should routinely assess the cognitive-linguistic processing of children with cleft lip and/or palate, especially phonological awareness, as part of their case management protocols.

Effect of 24 hours of sleep deprivation on auditory and linguistic perception: a comparison among young controls, sleep-deprived participants, dyslexic readers, and aging adults.

PubMed

Fostick, Leah; Babkoff, Harvey; Zukerman, Gil

2014-06-01

To test the effects of 24 hr of sleep deprivation on auditory and linguistic perception and to assess the magnitude of this effect by comparing such performance with that of aging adults on speech perception and with that of dyslexic readers on phonological awareness. Fifty-five sleep-deprived young adults were compared with 29 aging adults (older than 60 years) and with 18 young controls on auditory temporal order judgment (TOJ) and on speech perception tasks (Experiment 1). The sleep deprived were also compared with 51 dyslexic readers and with the young controls on TOJ and phonological awareness tasks (One-Minute Test for Pseudowords, Phoneme Deletion, Pig Latin, and Spoonerism; Experiment 2). Sleep deprivation resulted in longer TOJ thresholds, poorer speech perception, and poorer nonword reading compared with controls. The TOJ thresholds of the sleep deprived were comparable to those of the aging adults, but their pattern of speech performance differed. They also performed better on TOJ and phonological awareness than dyslexic readers. A variety of linguistic skills are affected by sleep deprivation. The comparison of sleep-deprived individuals with other groups with known difficulties in these linguistic skills might suggest that different groups exhibit common difficulties.

Dating the Origin of Language Using Phonemic Diversity

PubMed Central

2012-01-01

Language is a key adaptation of our species, yet we do not know when it evolved. Here, we use data on language phonemic diversity to estimate a minimum date for the origin of language. We take advantage of the fact that phonemic diversity evolves slowly and use it as a clock to calculate how long the oldest African languages would have to have been around in order to accumulate the number of phonemes they possess today. We use a natural experiment, the colonization of Southeast Asia and Andaman Islands, to estimate the rate at which phonemic diversity increases through time. Using this rate, we estimate that present-day languages date back to the Middle Stone Age in Africa. Our analysis is consistent with the archaeological evidence suggesting that complex human behavior evolved during the Middle Stone Age in Africa, and does not support the view that language is a recent adaptation that has sparked the dispersal of humans out of Africa. While some of our assumptions require testing and our results rely at present on a single case-study, our analysis constitutes the first estimate of when language evolved that is directly based on linguistic data. PMID:22558135

The Downside of Greater Lexical Influences: Selectively Poorer Speech Perception in Noise

PubMed Central

Xie, Zilong; Tessmer, Rachel; Chandrasekaran, Bharath

2017-01-01

Purpose Although lexical information influences phoneme perception, the extent to which reliance on lexical information enhances speech processing in challenging listening environments is unclear. We examined the extent to which individual differences in lexical influences on phonemic processing impact speech processing in maskers containing varying degrees of linguistic information (2-talker babble or pink noise). Method Twenty-nine monolingual English speakers were instructed to ignore the lexical status of spoken syllables (e.g., gift vs. kift) and to only categorize the initial phonemes (/g/ vs. /k/). The same participants then performed speech recognition tasks in the presence of 2-talker babble or pink noise in audio-only and audiovisual conditions. Results Individuals who demonstrated greater lexical influences on phonemic processing experienced greater speech processing difficulties in 2-talker babble than in pink noise. These selective difficulties were present across audio-only and audiovisual conditions. Conclusion Individuals with greater reliance on lexical processes during speech perception exhibit impaired speech recognition in listening conditions in which competing talkers introduce audible linguistic interferences. Future studies should examine the locus of lexical influences/interferences on phonemic processing and speech-in-speech processing. PMID:28586824

The Secret Is in the Sound

PubMed Central

Christiansen, Morten H.; Onnis, Luca; Hockema, Stephen A.

2009-01-01

When learning language young children are faced with many seemingly formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determine their lexical category, and propose an integrated model of how children might go from unsegmented speech to lexical categories. We corroborated this theoretical model using a two-stage computational analysis of a large corpus of English child-directed speech. First, we used transition probabilities between phonemes to find words in unsegmented speech. Second, we used distributional information about word edges—the beginning and ending phonemes of words—to predict whether the segmented words from the first stage were nouns, verbs, or something else. The results indicate that discovering lexical units and their associated syntactic category in child-directed speech is possible by attending to the statistics of single phoneme transitions and word-initial and final phonemes. Thus, we suggest that a core computational principle in language acquisition is that the same source of information is used to learn about different aspects of linguistic structure. PMID:19371361

Apathy, not depressive symptoms, as a predictor of semantic and phonemic fluency task performance in stroke and transient ischemic attack.

PubMed

Fishman, Keera N; Ashbaugh, Andrea R; Lanctôt, Krista L; Cayley, Megan L; Herrmann, Nathan; Murray, Brian J; Sicard, Michelle; Lien, Karen; Sahlas, Demetrios J; Swartz, Richard H

2018-06-01

This study examined the relationship between apathy and cognition in patients with cerebrovascular disease. Apathy may result from damage to frontal subcortical circuits causing dysexecutive syndromes, but apathy is also related to depression. We assessed the ability of apathy to predict phonemic fluency and semantic fluency performance after controlling for depressive symptoms in 282 individuals with stroke and/or transient ischemic attack. Participants (N = 282) completed the Phonemic Fluency Test, Semantic Fluency Test, Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, and Apathy Evaluation Scale. A cross-sectional correlational design was utilized. Using hierarchical linear regressions, apathy scores significantly predicted semantic fluency performance (β = -.159, p = .020), but not phonemic fluency performance (β = -.112, p = .129) after scaling scores by age and years of education and controlling for depressive symptoms. Depressive symptoms entered into the first step of both hierarchical linear regressions did not predict semantic fluency (β = -.035, p = .554) or phonemic fluency (β = -.081, p = .173). Apathy and depressive symptoms were moderately correlated, r(280) = .58, p < .001. The results of this study are consistent with research supporting a differentiation between phonemic and semantic fluency tasks, whereby phonemic fluency tasks primarily involve frontal regions, and semantic fluency tasks involve recruitment of more extended networks. The results also highlight a distinction between apathy and depressive symptoms and suggest that apathy may be a more reliable predictor of cognitive deficits than measures of mood in individuals with cerebrovascular disease. Apathy may also be more related to cognition due to overlapping motivational and cognitive frontal subcortical circuitry. Future research should explore whether treatments for apathy could be a novel target for improving cognitive outcomes after stroke.

Modulating phonemic fluency performance in healthy subjects with transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left or right lateral frontal cortex.

PubMed

Smirni, Daniela; Turriziani, Patrizia; Mangano, Giuseppa Renata; Bracco, Martina; Oliveri, Massimiliano; Cipolotti, Lisa

2017-07-28

A growing body of evidence have suggested that non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), can improve the performance of aphasic patients in language tasks. For example, application of inhibitory rTMS or tDCs over the right frontal lobe of dysphasic patients resulted in improved naming abilities. Several studies have also reported that in healthy controls (HC) tDCS application over the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) improve performance in naming and semantic fluency tasks. The aim of this study was to investigate in HC, for the first time, the effects of inhibitory repetitive TMS (rTMS) over left and right lateral frontal cortex (BA 47) on two phonemic fluency tasks (FAS or FPL). 44 right-handed HCs were administered rTMS or sham over the left or right lateral frontal cortex in two separate testing sessions, with a 24h interval, followed by the two phonemic fluency tasks. To account for possible practice effects, an additional 22 HCs were tested on only the phonemic fluency task across two sessions with no stimulation. We found that rTMS-inhibition over the left lateral frontal cortex significantly worsened phonemic fluency performance when compared to sham. In contrast, rTMS-inhibition over the right lateral frontal cortex significantly improved phonemic fluency performance when compared to sham. These results were not accounted for practice effects. We speculated that rTMS over the right lateral frontal cortex may induce plastic neural changes to the left lateral frontal cortex by suppressing interhemispheric inhibitory interactions. This resulted in an increased excitability (disinhibition) of the contralateral unstimulated left lateral frontal cortex, consequently enhancing phonemic fluency performance. Conversely, application of rTMS over the left lateral frontal cortex may induce a temporary, virtual lesion, with effects similar to those reported in left frontal patients. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Real-time speech-driven animation of expressive talking faces

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Jia; You, Mingyu; Chen, Chun; Song, Mingli

2011-05-01

In this paper, we present a real-time facial animation system in which speech drives mouth movements and facial expressions synchronously. Considering five basic emotions, a hierarchical structure with an upper layer of emotion classification is established. Based on the recognized emotion label, the under-layer classification at sub-phonemic level has been modelled on the relationship between acoustic features of frames and audio labels in phonemes. Using certain constraint, the predicted emotion labels of speech are adjusted to gain the facial expression labels which are combined with sub-phonemic labels. The combinations are mapped into facial action units (FAUs), and audio-visual synchronized animation with mouth movements and facial expressions is generated by morphing between FAUs. The experimental results demonstrate that the two-layer structure succeeds in both emotion and sub-phonemic classifications, and the synthesized facial sequences reach a comparative convincing quality.

Effects of a Randomized Reading Intervention Study Aimed at 9-Year-Olds: A 5-Year Follow-up.

PubMed

Wolff, Ulrika

2016-05-01

The present paper reports on a 5-year follow-up of a randomized reading intervention in grade 3 in Sweden. An intervention group (n = 57) received daily training for 12 weeks in phoneme/grapheme mapping, reading comprehension and reading speed, whereas a control group (n = 55) participated in ordinary classroom activities. The main aim was to investigate if there were remaining effects of the intervention on reading-related skills. Previous analyses showed that the intervention group performed significantly better than the control group on spelling, reading speed, reading comprehension and phoneme awareness at the immediate post-test with sustained effects 1 year later. Results from the 5-year follow-up show that the only significant difference between the intervention (n = 47) and the control group (n = 37) was on word decoding. There was also a significant interaction effect of group assignment and initial word decoding, in the way that the lowest-performing students benefitted the most from the intervention. Another aim was to examine if the children identified in a screening (n = 2212) as poor readers in grade 2 still performed worse than typical readers. The analyses showed that the typically developing students (n = 66) outperformed the students identified as poor readers in grade 2 on working memory, spelling, reading comprehension and word decoding. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Statistical properties of Chinese phonemic networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yu, Shuiyuan; Liu, Haitao; Xu, Chunshan

2011-04-01

The study of properties of speech sound systems is of great significance in understanding the human cognitive mechanism and the working principles of speech sound systems. Some properties of speech sound systems, such as the listener-oriented feature and the talker-oriented feature, have been unveiled with the statistical study of phonemes in human languages and the research of the interrelations between human articulatory gestures and the corresponding acoustic parameters. With all the phonemes of speech sound systems treated as a coherent whole, our research, which focuses on the dynamic properties of speech sound systems in operation, investigates some statistical parameters of Chinese phoneme networks based on real text and dictionaries. The findings are as follows: phonemic networks have high connectivity degrees and short average distances; the degrees obey normal distribution and the weighted degrees obey power law distribution; vowels enjoy higher priority than consonants in the actual operation of speech sound systems; the phonemic networks have high robustness against targeted attacks and random errors. In addition, for investigating the structural properties of a speech sound system, a statistical study of dictionaries is conducted, which shows the higher frequency of shorter words and syllables and the tendency that the longer a word is, the shorter the syllables composing it are. From these structural properties and dynamic properties one can derive the following conclusion: the static structure of a speech sound system tends to promote communication efficiency and save articulation effort while the dynamic operation of this system gives preference to reliable transmission and easy recognition. In short, a speech sound system is an effective, efficient and reliable communication system optimized in many aspects.

Phoneme Similarity and Confusability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bailey, T.M.; Hahn, U.

2005-01-01

Similarity between component speech sounds influences language processing in numerous ways. Explanation and detailed prediction of linguistic performance consequently requires an understanding of these basic similarities. The research reported in this paper contrasts two broad classes of approach to the issue of phoneme similarity-theoretically…

Ultrasound visual feedback in articulation therapy following partial glossectomy.

PubMed

Blyth, Katrina M; Mccabe, Patricia; Madill, Catherine; Ballard, Kirrie J

2016-01-01

Disordered speech is common following treatment for tongue cancer, however there is insufficient high quality evidence to guide clinical decision making about treatment. This study investigated use of ultrasound tongue imaging as a visual feedback tool to guide tongue placement during articulation therapy with two participants following partial glossectomy. A Phase I multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to investigate therapeutic effect of ultrasound visual feedback during speech rehabilitation. Percent consonants correct and speech intelligibility at sentence level were used to measure acquisition, generalization and maintenance of speech skills for treated and untreated related phonemes, while unrelated phonemes were tested to demonstrate experimental control. Swallowing and oromotor measures were also taken to monitor change. Sentence intelligibility was not a sensitive measure of speech change, but both participants demonstrated significant change in percent consonants correct for treated phonemes. One participant also demonstrated generalization to non-treated phonemes. Control phonemes along with swallow and oromotor measures remained stable throughout the study. This study establishes therapeutic benefit of ultrasound visual feedback in speech rehabilitation following partial glossectomy. Readers will be able to explain why and how tongue cancer surgery impacts on articulation precision. Readers will also be able to explain the acquisition, generalization and maintenance effects in the study. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Computer-based auditory phoneme discrimination training improves speech recognition in noise in experienced adult cochlear implant listeners.

PubMed

Schumann, Annette; Serman, Maja; Gefeller, Olaf; Hoppe, Ulrich

2015-03-01

Specific computer-based auditory training may be a useful completion in the rehabilitation process for cochlear implant (CI) listeners to achieve sufficient speech intelligibility. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a computerized, phoneme-discrimination training programme. The study employed a pretest-post-test design; participants were randomly assigned to the training or control group. Over a period of three weeks, the training group was instructed to train in phoneme discrimination via computer, twice a week. Sentence recognition in different noise conditions (moderate to difficult) was tested pre- and post-training, and six months after the training was completed. The control group was tested and retested within one month. Twenty-seven adult CI listeners who had been using cochlear implants for more than two years participated in the programme; 15 adults in the training group, 12 adults in the control group. Besides significant improvements for the trained phoneme-identification task, a generalized training effect was noted via significantly improved sentence recognition in moderate noise. No significant changes were noted in the difficult noise conditions. Improved performance was maintained over an extended period. Phoneme-discrimination training improves experienced CI listeners' speech perception in noise. Additional research is needed to optimize auditory training for individual benefit.

Understanding native Russian listeners' errors on an English word recognition test: model-based analysis of phoneme confusion.

PubMed

Shi, Lu-Feng; Morozova, Natalia

2012-08-01

Word recognition is a basic component in a comprehensive hearing evaluation, but data are lacking for listeners speaking two languages. This study obtained such data for Russian natives in the US and analysed the data using the perceptual assimilation model (PAM) and speech learning model (SLM). Listeners were randomly presented 200 NU-6 words in quiet. Listeners responded verbally and in writing. Performance was scored on words and phonemes (word-initial consonants, vowels, and word-final consonants). Seven normal-hearing, adult monolingual English natives (NM), 16 English-dominant (ED), and 15 Russian-dominant (RD) Russian natives participated. ED and RD listeners differed significantly in their language background. Consistent with the SLM, NM outperformed ED listeners and ED outperformed RD listeners, whether responses were scored on words or phonemes. NM and ED listeners shared similar phoneme error patterns, whereas RD listeners' errors had unique patterns that could be largely understood via the PAM. RD listeners had particular difficulty differentiating vowel contrasts /i-I/, /æ-ε/, and /ɑ-Λ/, word-initial consonant contrasts /p-h/ and /b-f/, and word-final contrasts /f-v/. Both first-language phonology and second-language learning history affect word and phoneme recognition. Current findings may help clinicians differentiate word recognition errors due to language background from hearing pathologies.

The influence of visual speech information on the intelligibility of English consonants produced by non-native speakers.

PubMed

Kawase, Saya; Hannah, Beverly; Wang, Yue

2014-09-01

This study examines how visual speech information affects native judgments of the intelligibility of speech sounds produced by non-native (L2) speakers. Native Canadian English perceivers as judges perceived three English phonemic contrasts (/b-v, θ-s, l-ɹ/) produced by native Japanese speakers as well as native Canadian English speakers as controls. These stimuli were presented under audio-visual (AV, with speaker voice and face), audio-only (AO), and visual-only (VO) conditions. The results showed that, across conditions, the overall intelligibility of Japanese productions of the native (Japanese)-like phonemes (/b, s, l/) was significantly higher than the non-Japanese phonemes (/v, θ, ɹ/). In terms of visual effects, the more visually salient non-Japanese phonemes /v, θ/ were perceived as significantly more intelligible when presented in the AV compared to the AO condition, indicating enhanced intelligibility when visual speech information is available. However, the non-Japanese phoneme /ɹ/ was perceived as less intelligible in the AV compared to the AO condition. Further analysis revealed that, unlike the native English productions, the Japanese speakers produced /ɹ/ without visible lip-rounding, indicating that non-native speakers' incorrect articulatory configurations may decrease the degree of intelligibility. These results suggest that visual speech information may either positively or negatively affect L2 speech intelligibility.

The serial nature of the masked onset priming effect revisited.

PubMed

Mousikou, Petroula; Coltheart, Max

2014-01-01

Reading aloud is faster when target words/nonwords are preceded by masked prime words/nonwords that share their first sound with the target (e.g., save-SINK) compared to when primes and targets are unrelated to each other (e.g., farm-SINK). This empirical phenomenon is the masked onset priming effect (MOPE) and is known to be due to serial left-to-right processing of the prime by a sublexical reading mechanism. However, the literature in this domain lacks a critical experiment. It is possible that when primes are real words their orthographic/phonological representations are activated in parallel and holistically during prime presentation, so any phoneme overlap between primes and targets (and not just initial-phoneme overlap) could facilitate target reading aloud. This is the prediction made by the only computational models of reading aloud that are able to simulate the MOPE, namely the DRC1.2.1, CDP+, and CDP++ models. We tested this prediction in the present study and found that initial-phoneme overlap (blip-BEST), but not end-phoneme overlap (flat-BEST), facilitated target reading aloud compared to no phoneme overlap (junk-BEST). These results provide support for a reading mechanism that operates serially and from left to right, yet are inconsistent with all existing computational models of single-word reading aloud.

Use of Botulinum Neurotoxin for the Treatment of Movement Disorders

MedlinePlus

... spasmodic dysphonia, or ABSD). Does BoNT control motor tics? Tics associated with Tourette syndrome are relatively brief, intermittent movements (also known as motor tics) or sounds (also known as vocal or phonic ...

THE PHONEMES OF OKINAWAN.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

LUELSDORFF, PHILIP A.

THE LANGUAGES OF OKINAWAN MAY BE DIVIDED INTO THREE MUTUALLY UNINTELLIGIBLE REGIONAL DIALECTS, CORRESPONDING GEOGRAPHICALLY TO THE THREE GROUPS OF ISLANDS OF THE RYUUKYUU ARCHIPELAGO. AS REPRESENTATIVE MODEL OF THE REGIONAL DIALECTS, AGENA-GUCHI IS ANALYZED WITH RESPECT TO PHONEMIC SYSTEMS, OKINAWAN MORPHOPHONEMICS, AND OKINAWAN SYLLABLE STRUCTURE…

Phonological Iconicity Electrifies: An ERP Study on Affective Sound-to-Meaning Correspondences in German

PubMed Central

Ullrich, Susann; Kotz, Sonja A.; Schmidtke, David S.; Aryani, Arash; Conrad, Markus

2016-01-01

While linguistic theory posits an arbitrary relation between signifiers and the signified (de Saussure, 1916), our analysis of a large-scale German database containing affective ratings of words revealed that certain phoneme clusters occur more often in words denoting concepts with negative and arousing meaning. Here, we investigate how such phoneme clusters that potentially serve as sublexical markers of affect can influence language processing. We registered the EEG signal during a lexical decision task with a novel manipulation of the words' putative sublexical affective potential: the means of valence and arousal values for single phoneme clusters, each computed as a function of respective values of words from the database these phoneme clusters occur in. Our experimental manipulations also investigate potential contributions of formal salience to the sublexical affective potential: Typically, negative high-arousing phonological segments—based on our calculations—tend to be less frequent and more structurally complex than neutral ones. We thus constructed two experimental sets, one involving this natural confound, while controlling for it in the other. A negative high-arousing sublexical affective potential in the strictly controlled stimulus set yielded an early posterior negativity (EPN), in similar ways as an independent manipulation of lexical affective content did. When other potentially salient formal features at the sublexical level were not controlled for, the effect of the sublexical affective potential was strengthened and prolonged (250–650 ms), presumably because formal salience helps making specific phoneme clusters efficient sublexical markers of negative high-arousing affective meaning. These neurophysiological data support the assumption that the organization of a language's vocabulary involves systematic sound-to-meaning correspondences at the phonemic level that influence the way we process language. PMID:27588008

Parietotemporal Stimulation Affects Acquisition of Novel Grapheme-Phoneme Mappings in Adult Readers

PubMed Central

Younger, Jessica W.; Booth, James R.

2018-01-01

Neuroimaging work from developmental and reading intervention research has suggested a cause of reading failure may be lack of engagement of parietotemporal cortex during initial acquisition of grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) mappings. Parietotemporal activation increases following grapheme-phoneme learning and successful reading intervention. Further, stimulation of parietotemporal cortex improves reading skill in lower ability adults. However, it is unclear whether these improvements following stimulation are due to enhanced grapheme-phoneme mapping abilities. To test this hypothesis, we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to manipulate parietotemporal function in adult readers as they learned a novel artificial orthography with new grapheme-phoneme mappings. Participants received real or sham stimulation to the left inferior parietal lobe (L IPL) for 20 min before training. They received explicit training over the course of 3 days on 10 novel words each day. Learning of the artificial orthography was assessed at a pre-training baseline session, the end of each of the three training sessions, an immediate post-training session and a delayed post-training session about 4 weeks after training. Stimulation interacted with baseline reading skill to affect learning of trained words and transfer to untrained words. Lower skill readers showed better acquisition, whereas higher skill readers showed worse acquisition, when training was paired with real stimulation, as compared to readers who received sham stimulation. However, readers of all skill levels showed better maintenance of trained material following parietotemporal stimulation, indicating a differential effect of stimulation on initial learning and consolidation. Overall, these results indicate that parietotemporal stimulation can enhance learning of new grapheme-phoneme relationships in readers with lower reading skill. Yet, while parietotemporal function is critical to new learning, its role in continued reading improvement likely changes as readers progress in skill. PMID:29628882

A longitudinal study investigating neural processing of speech envelope modulation rates in children with (a family risk for) dyslexia.

PubMed

De Vos, Astrid; Vanvooren, Sophie; Vanderauwera, Jolijn; Ghesquière, Pol; Wouters, Jan

2017-08-01

Recent evidence suggests that a fundamental deficit in the synchronization of neural oscillations to temporal information in speech may underlie phonological processing problems in dyslexia. Since previous studies were performed cross-sectionally in school-aged children or adults, developmental aspects of neural auditory processing in relation to reading acquisition and dyslexia remain to be investigated. The present longitudinal study followed 68 children during development from pre-reader (5 years old) to beginning reader (7 years old) and more advanced reader (9 years old). Thirty-six children had a family risk for dyslexia and 14 children eventually developed dyslexia. EEG recordings of auditory steady-state responses to 4 and 20 Hz modulations, corresponding to syllable and phoneme rates, were collected at each point in time. Our results demonstrate an increase in neural synchronization to phoneme-rate modulations around the onset of reading acquisition. This effect was negatively correlated with later reading and phonological skills, indicating that children who exhibit the largest increase in neural synchronization to phoneme rates, develop the poorest reading and phonological skills. Accordingly, neural synchronization to phoneme-rate modulations was found to be significantly higher in beginning and more advanced readers with dyslexia. We found no developmental effects regarding neural synchronization to syllable rates, nor any effects of a family risk for dyslexia. Altogether, our findings suggest that the onset of reading instruction coincides with an increase in neural responsiveness to phoneme-rate modulations, and that the extent of this increase is related to (the outcome of) reading development. Hereby, dyslexic children persistently demonstrate atypically high neural synchronization to phoneme rates from the beginning of reading acquisition onwards. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Verbal task demands are key in explaining the relationship between paired-associate learning and reading ability.

PubMed

Clayton, Francina J; Sears, Claire; Davis, Alice; Hulme, Charles

2018-07-01

Paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks measure the ability to form a novel association between a stimulus and a response. Performance on such tasks is strongly associated with reading ability, and there is increasing evidence that verbal task demands may be critical in explaining this relationship. The current study investigated the relationships between different forms of PAL and reading ability. A total of 97 children aged 8-10 years completed a battery of reading assessments and six different PAL tasks (phoneme-phoneme, visual-phoneme, nonverbal-nonverbal, visual-nonverbal, nonword-nonword, and visual-nonword) involving both familiar phonemes and unfamiliar nonwords. A latent variable path model showed that PAL ability is captured by two correlated latent variables: auditory-articulatory and visual-articulatory. The auditory-articulatory latent variable was the stronger predictor of reading ability, providing support for a verbal account of the PAL-reading relationship. Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Extrinsic cognitive load impairs low-level speech perception.

PubMed

Mattys, Sven L; Barden, Katharine; Samuel, Arthur G

2014-06-01

Recent research has suggested that the extrinsic cognitive load generated by performing a nonlinguistic visual task while perceiving speech increases listeners' reliance on lexical knowledge and decreases their capacity to perceive phonetic detail. In the present study, we asked whether this effect is accounted for better at a lexical or a sublexical level. The former would imply that cognitive load directly affects lexical activation but not perceptual sensitivity; the latter would imply that increased lexical reliance under cognitive load is only a secondary consequence of imprecise or incomplete phonetic encoding. Using the phoneme restoration paradigm, we showed that perceptual sensitivity decreases (i.e., phoneme restoration increases) almost linearly with the effort involved in the concurrent visual task. However, cognitive load had only a minimal effect on the contribution of lexical information to phoneme restoration. We concluded that the locus of extrinsic cognitive load on the speech system is perceptual rather than lexical. Mechanisms by which cognitive load increases tolerance to acoustic imprecision and broadens phonemic categories were discussed.

Verbal and Nonverbal Predictors of Spelling Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sadoski, Mark; Willson, Victor L.; Holcomb, Angelia; Boulware-Gooden, Regina

2005-01-01

Verbal and nonverbal predictors of spelling performance in Grades 1-12 were investigated using the national norming data from a standardized spelling test. Verbal variables included number of letters, phonemes, syllables, digraphs, blends, silent markers, r-controlled vowels, and the proportion of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. The nonverbal…

Elegant Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence: A Periodic Chart and Singularity Generalization Unify Decoding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gates, Louis

2018-01-01

The accompanying article introduces highly transparent grapheme-phoneme relationships embodied within a Periodic table of decoding cells, which arguably presents the quintessential transparent decoding elements. The study then folds these cells into one highly transparent but simply stated singularity generalization--this generalization unifies…

The Categorical Perception Deficit in Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Noordenbos, Mark W.; Serniclaes, Willy

2015-01-01

Speech perception in dyslexia is characterized by a categorical perception (CP) deficit, demonstrated by weaker discrimination of acoustic differences between phonemic categories in conjunction with better discrimination of acoustic differences within phonemic categories. We performed a meta-analysis of studies that examined the reliability of the…

An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. Revised Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gleason, H.A., Jr.

Beginning chapters of this volume define language and describe the sound, stress, and intonation systems of English. The body of the text explores extensively morphology, phonetics, phonemics, and the process of communication. Individual chapters detail such topics as morphemes, syntactic devices, grammatical systems, phonemic problems in language…

Verbal and Non-verbal Fluency in Adults with Developmental Dyslexia: Phonological Processing or Executive Control Problems?

PubMed

Smith-Spark, James H; Henry, Lucy A; Messer, David J; Zięcik, Adam P

2017-08-01

The executive function of fluency describes the ability to generate items according to specific rules. Production of words beginning with a certain letter (phonemic fluency) is impaired in dyslexia, while generation of words belonging to a certain semantic category (semantic fluency) is typically unimpaired. However, in dyslexia, verbal fluency has generally been studied only in terms of overall words produced. Furthermore, performance of adults with dyslexia on non-verbal design fluency tasks has not been explored but would indicate whether deficits could be explained by executive control, rather than phonological processing, difficulties. Phonemic, semantic and design fluency tasks were presented to adults with dyslexia and without dyslexia, using fine-grained performance measures and controlling for IQ. Hierarchical regressions indicated that dyslexia predicted lower phonemic fluency, but not semantic or design fluency. At the fine-grained level, dyslexia predicted a smaller number of switches between subcategories on phonemic fluency, while dyslexia did not predict the size of phonemically related clusters of items. Overall, the results suggested that phonological processing problems were at the root of dyslexia-related fluency deficits; however, executive control difficulties could not be completely ruled out as an alternative explanation. Developments in research methodology, equating executive demands across fluency tasks, may resolve this issue. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

National photonics skills standards for technicians

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hull, Darrell M.

1995-10-01

Photonics is defined as the generation, manipulation, transport, detection, and use of light information and energy whose quantum unit is the photon. The range of applications of phonics extends from energy generation to detection to communication and information processing. Photonics is at the heart of today's communication systems, from the laser that generates the digital information transported along a fiber- optic cable to the detector that decodes the information. Whether the transmitted information is a phone call from across the street or across the globe, photonics brings it to you. Where your health is concerned, photonics allows physicians to do minimally invasive surgery using fiber-optic endoscopes and lasers. Researches using spectroscopy and microscopy are pushing the frontiers of biotechnology in activities as widespread as diagnosing disease and probing the mysteries of the genetic code. Advanced sensing and imaging techniques monitor the environment, gathering data on crops and forests, analyzing the ocean's currents and contents, and probing the atmosphere of pollutants. Transportation needs are being impacted by photonic sensors and laser rangefinders that will soon monitor and control the traffic on our nation's highways. In our factories, photonics provides machine vision systems that give a level of quality control human inspectors could never achieve. In manufacturing, lasers are replacing a variety of cutting, welding, and marking techniques, while imaging systems teamed with neural networks are producing intelligent robots. In short, photonics is paving our way into the new millennium. The skill standard is intended to define the knowledge and capabilities - the skills - that workers in the phonics industry need. Phonics will be one of the primary battlefields of the world economic conflict, and it is imperative that U.S. photonics technicians be skilled enough to allow the United States to remain competitive in a global marketplace. The focus of this standard is on the skills necessary for employment as a phonics technician and is not intended to be an analysis of those skills that are important for workers in all occupational areas. A comprehensive treatment of the skills necessary for all workers has been the subject of a number of studies, most notably, the work of the Secretary's Commission on the Achievement of Necessary Skills (SCANS). It is our hope at CORD that the work presented in the standard lends more detail and rational for the accomplishment of the broader skills that should be obtained by all students.

What a Nonnative Speaker of English Needs to Learn through Listening.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bohlken, Robert; Macias, Lori

Teaching nonnative speakers of English to listen for the discriminating nuances of the language is an important but neglected aspect of American English language training. A discriminating listening process follows a sequence of distinguishing phonemes, supra segmental phonemes, morphemes, and syntax. Certain phonetic differences can be noted…

The Downside of Greater Lexical Influences: Selectively Poorer Speech Perception in Noise

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lam, Boji P. W.; Xie, Zilong; Tessmer, Rachel; Chandrasekaran, Bharath

2017-01-01

Purpose: Although lexical information influences phoneme perception, the extent to which reliance on lexical information enhances speech processing in challenging listening environments is unclear. We examined the extent to which individual differences in lexical influences on phonemic processing impact speech processing in maskers containing…

Changes in Articulator Movement Variability during Phonemic Development: A Longitudinal Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grigos, Maria I.

2009-01-01

Purpose: The present study explored articulator movement variability during voicing contrast acquisition. The purpose was to examine whether oral articulator movement trajectories associated with the production of voiced/voiceless bilabial phonemes in children became less variable over time. Method: Jaw, lower lip, and upper lip movements were…

Techniques for decoding speech phonemes and sounds: A concept

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lokerson, D. C.; Holby, H. G.

1975-01-01

Techniques studied involve conversion of speech sounds into machine-compatible pulse trains. (1) Voltage-level quantizer produces number of output pulses proportional to amplitude characteristics of vowel-type phoneme waveforms. (2) Pulses produced by quantizer of first speech formants are compared with pulses produced by second formants.

Evolution of a Rapidly Learned Representation for Speech.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nakisa, Ramin Charles; Plunkett, Kim

1998-01-01

Describes a connectionist model accounting for newborn infants' ability to finely discriminate almost all human speech contrasts and the fact that their phonemic category boundaries are identical, even for phonemes outside their target language. The model posits an innately guided learning in which an artificial neural network is stored in a…

Contemporary Issues in Phoneme Production by Hearing-Impaired Persons: Physiological and Acoustic Aspects.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McGarr, Nancy S.; Whitehead, Robert

1992-01-01

This paper on physiologic correlates of speech production in children and youth with hearing impairments focuses specifically on the production of phonemes and includes data on respiration for speech production, phonation, speech aerodynamics, articulation, and acoustic analyses of speech by hearing-impaired persons. (Author/DB)

Does Vowel Inventory Density Affect Vowel-to-Vowel Coarticulation?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mok, Peggy P. K.

2013-01-01

This study tests the output constraints hypothesis that languages with a crowded phonemic vowel space would allow less vowel-to-vowel coarticulation than languages with a sparser vowel space to avoid perceptual confusion. Mandarin has fewer vowel phonemes than Cantonese, but their allophonic vowel spaces are similarly crowded. The hypothesis…

A Phonological Exploration of Oral Reading Errors.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moscicki, Eve K.; Tallal, Paula

1981-01-01

Presents study exploring oral reading errors of normally developing readers to determine any developmental differences in learning phoneme-grapheme units; to discover if the grapheme representations of some phonemes are more difficult to read than others; and to replicate results reported by Fowler, et. al. Findings show most oral reading errors…

Phonological Treatment Efficacy and Developmental Norms.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gierut, Judith A.; And Others

1996-01-01

Two studies, one within subjects and the other across subjects, evaluated the efficacy of teaching sounds in developmental sequence to nine young children (ages three to five). Treatment of later-acquired phonemes led to systemwide changes in untreated sound classes, whereas treatment of early-acquired phonemes did not. Findings suggest…

Express Yourself: Communication Disabilities Need Not Be Handicaps.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johnson, Peg L.

Individuals with communicative disorders can achieve self-expression through the use of portable electronic augmentative communication aids. Real-life examples describe how individuals use microcomputers and other communication aids, such as "Express III,""Light Talker,""Phonic Mirror Handivoice 110,""Canon…

Sacred Cows That Should Be Put to Pasture.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Artley, A. Sterl

This paper examines some of the problems associated with unquestioned teaching practices and theories ("sacred cows") in the field of reading. Topics discussed include phonics, pronunciation, oral reading, teacher accountability and behavioral objectives, individualized reading, and the open classroom. (KS)

Memory for pictures and words as a function of level of processing: Depth or dual coding?

PubMed

D'Agostino, P R; O'Neill, B J; Paivio, A

1977-03-01

The experiment was designed to test differential predictions derived from dual-coding and depth-of-processing hypotheses. Subjects under incidental memory instructions free recalled a list of 36 test events, each presented twice. Within the list, an equal number of events were assigned to structural, phonemic, and semantic processing conditions. Separate groups of subjects were tested with a list of pictures, concrete words, or abstract words. Results indicated that retention of concrete words increased as a direct function of the processing-task variable (structural < phonemic

Computer game as a tool for training the identification of phonemic length.

PubMed

Pennala, Riitta; Richardson, Ulla; Ylinen, Sari; Lyytinen, Heikki; Martin, Maisa

2014-12-01

Computer-assisted training of Finnish phonemic length was conducted with 7-year-old Russian-speaking second-language learners of Finnish. Phonemic length plays a different role in these two languages. The training included game activities with two- and three-syllable word and pseudo-word minimal pairs with prototypical vowel durations. The lowest accuracy scores were recorded for two-syllable words. Accuracy scores were higher for the minimal pairs with larger rather than smaller differences in duration. Accuracy scores were lower for long duration than for short duration. The ability to identify quantity degree was generalized to stimuli used in the identification test in two of the children. Ideas for improving the game are introduced.

Cortical oscillations related to processing congruent and incongruent grapheme-phoneme pairs.

PubMed

Herdman, Anthony T; Fujioka, Takako; Chau, Wilkin; Ross, Bernhard; Pantev, Christo; Picton, Terence W

2006-05-15

In this study, we investigated changes in cortical oscillations following congruent and incongruent grapheme-phoneme stimuli. Hiragana graphemes and phonemes were simultaneously presented as congruent or incongruent audiovisual stimuli to native Japanese-speaking participants. The discriminative reaction time was 57 ms shorter for congruent than incongruent stimuli. Analysis of MEG responses using synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) revealed that congruent stimuli evoked larger 2-10 Hz activity in the left auditory cortex within the first 250 ms after stimulus onset, and smaller 2-16 Hz activity in bilateral visual cortices between 250 and 500 ms. These results indicate that congruent visual input can modify cortical activity in the left auditory cortex.

Discrimination of Phonemic Vowel Length by Japanese Infants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sato, Yutaka; Sogabe, Yuko; Mazuka, Reiko

2010-01-01

Japanese has a vowel duration contrast as one component of its language-specific phonemic repertory to distinguish word meanings. It is not clear, however, how a sensitivity to vowel duration can develop in a linguistic context. In the present study, using the visual habituation-dishabituation method, the authors evaluated infants' abilities to…

The Tonal Function of a Task-Irrelevant Chord Modulates Speed of Visual Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Escoffier, N.; Tillmann, B.

2008-01-01

Harmonic priming studies have provided evidence that musical expectations influence sung phoneme monitoring, with facilitated processing for phonemes sung on tonally related (expected) chords in comparison to less-related (less-expected) chords [Bigand, Tillmann, Poulin, D'Adamo, and Madurell (2001). "The effect of harmonic context on phoneme…

The Status of the Concept of "Phoneme" in Psycholinguistics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Uppstad, Per Henning; Tonnessen, Finn Egil

2010-01-01

The notion of the phoneme counts as a break-through of modern theoretical linguistics in the early twentieth century. It paved the way for descriptions of distinctive features at different levels in linguistics. Although it has since then had a turbulent existence across altering theoretical positions, it remains a powerful concept of a…

Error Variability and the Differentiation between Apraxia of Speech and Aphasia with Phonemic Paraphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haley, Katarina L.; Jacks, Adam; Cunningham, Kevin T.

2013-01-01

Purpose: This study was conducted to evaluate the clinical utility of error variability for differentiating between apraxia of speech (AOS) and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia. Method: Participants were 32 individuals with aphasia after left cerebral injury. Diagnostic groups were formed on the basis of operationalized measures of recognized…

Perception of Vowel Length by Japanese- and English-Learning Infants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mugitani, Ryoko; Pons, Ferran; Fais, Laurel; Dietrich, Christiane; Werker, Janet F.; Amano, Shigeaki

2009-01-01

This study investigated vowel length discrimination in infants from 2 language backgrounds, Japanese and English, in which vowel length is either phonemic or nonphonemic. Experiment 1 revealed that English 18-month-olds discriminate short and long vowels although vowel length is not phonemically contrastive in English. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed…

Error Biases in Inner and Overt Speech: Evidence from Tongue Twisters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Corley, Martin; Brocklehurst, Paul H.; Moat, H. Susannah

2011-01-01

To compare the properties of inner and overt speech, Oppenheim and Dell (2008) counted participants' self-reported speech errors when reciting tongue twisters either overtly or silently and found a bias toward substituting phonemes that resulted in words in both conditions, but a bias toward substituting similar phonemes only when speech was…

Neural Correlates in the Processing of Phoneme-Level Complexity in Vowel Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Park, Haeil; Iverson, Gregory K.; Park, Hae-Jeong

2011-01-01

We investigated how articulatory complexity at the phoneme level is manifested neurobiologically in an overt production task. fMRI images were acquired from young Korean-speaking adults as they pronounced bisyllabic pseudowords in which we manipulated phonological complexity defined in terms of vowel duration and instability (viz., COMPLEX:…

Training Phoneme Blending Skills in Children with Down Syndrome

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burgoyne, Kelly; Duff, Fiona; Snowling, Maggie; Buckley, Sue; Hulme, Charles

2013-01-01

This article reports the evaluation of a 6-week programme of teaching designed to support the development of phoneme blending skills in children with Down syndrome (DS). Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver the intervention to individual children in daily 10-15-minute sessions, within a broader context of reading and language…

A Brief Critique of Chomsky's Challenge to Classical Phonemic Phonology.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Ngar-Fun

1994-01-01

Phonemic phonology became important because it provided a descriptive account of dialects and languages that had never been transcribed before, and it derives its greatest strength from its practical orientation, which has proved beneficial to language teaching and learning. Noam Chomsky's criticisms of it are largely unjust because he has not…

Speech Rate Normalization and Phonemic Boundary Perception in Cochlear-Implant Users

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jaekel, Brittany N.; Newman, Rochelle S.; Goupell, Matthew J.

2017-01-01

Purpose: Normal-hearing (NH) listeners rate normalize, temporarily remapping phonemic category boundaries to account for a talker's speech rate. It is unknown if adults who use auditory prostheses called cochlear implants (CI) can rate normalize, as CIs transmit degraded speech signals to the auditory nerve. Ineffective adjustment to rate…

Early Speech Production of Children with Cleft Palate.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Estrem, Theresa; Broen, Patricia A.

1989-01-01

The study comparing word-initial target phonemes and phoneme production of five toddlers with cleft palate and five normal toddlers found that the cleft palate children tended to target more words with word-initial nasals, approximants, and vowels and fewer words with word-initial stops, fricatives, and affricates than normal children. (Author/DB)

On Sources of the Word Length Effect in Young Readers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gagl, Benjamin; Hawelka, Stefan; Wimmer, Heinz

2015-01-01

We investigated how letter length, phoneme length, and consonant clusters contribute to the word length effect in 2nd- and 4th-grade children. They read words from three different conditions: In one condition, letter length increased but phoneme length did not due to multiletter graphemes (H"aus"-B"auch"-S"chach"). In…

Differential Prefrontal and Frontotemporal Oxygenation Patterns during Phonemic and Semantic Verbal Fluency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tupak, Sara V.; Badewien, Meike; Dresler, Thomas; Hahn, Tim; Ernst, Lena H.; Herrmann, Martin J.; Fallgatter, Andreas J.; Ehlis, Ann-Christine

2012-01-01

Movement artifacts are still considered a problematic issue for imaging research on overt language production. This motion-sensitivity can be overcome by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). In the present study, 50 healthy subjects performed a combined phonemic and semantic overt verbal fluency task while frontal and temporal cortex…

DECODAGE DE LA CHAINE PARLEE ET APPRENTISSAGE DES LANGUES (SPEECH DECODING AND LANGUAGE LEARNING).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

COMPANYS, EMMANUEL

THIS PAPER WRITTEN IN FRENCH, PRESENTS A HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING THE DECODING OF SPEECH IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING. THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OF THE DISCUSSION CONSISTS OF WIDELY ACCEPTED LINGUISTIC CONCEPTS SUCH AS THE PHONEME, DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, NEUTRALIZATION, LINGUISTIC LEVELS, FORM AND SUBSTANCE, EXPRESSION AND CONTENT, SOUNDS, PHONEMES,…

Listeners Retune Phoneme Categories across Languages

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reinisch, Eva; Weber, Andrea; Mitterer, Holger

2013-01-01

Native listeners adapt to noncanonically produced speech by retuning phoneme boundaries by means of lexical knowledge. We asked whether a second language lexicon can also guide category retuning and whether perceptual learning transfers from a second language (L2) to the native language (L1). During a Dutch lexical-decision task, German and Dutch…

Structure of Preschool Phonological Sensitivity: Overlapping Sensitivity to Rhyme, Words, Syllables, and Phonemes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anthony, Jason L.; Lonigan, Christopher J.; Burgess, Stephen R.; Driscoll, Kimberly; Phillips, Beth M.; Cantor, Brenlee G.

2002-01-01

This study examined relations among sensitivity to words, syllables, rhymes, and phonemes in older and younger preschoolers. Confirmatory factor analyses found that a one-factor model best explained the date from both groups of children. Only variance common to all phonological sensitivity skills was related to print knowledge and rudimentary…

The Effect of Adaptive Nonlinear Frequency Compression on Phoneme Perception.

PubMed

Glista, Danielle; Hawkins, Marianne; Bohnert, Andrea; Rehmann, Julia; Wolfe, Jace; Scollie, Susan

2017-12-12

This study implemented a fitting method, developed for use with frequency lowering hearing aids, across multiple testing sites, participants, and hearing aid conditions to evaluate speech perception with a novel type of frequency lowering. A total of 8 participants, including children and young adults, participated in real-world hearing aid trials. A blinded crossover design, including posttrial withdrawal testing, was used to assess aided phoneme perception. The hearing aid conditions included adaptive nonlinear frequency compression (NFC), static NFC, and conventional processing. Enabling either adaptive NFC or static NFC improved group-level detection and recognition results for some high-frequency phonemes, when compared with conventional processing. Mean results for the distinction component of the Phoneme Perception Test (Schmitt, Winkler, Boretzki, & Holube, 2016) were similar to those obtained with conventional processing. Findings suggest that both types of NFC tested in this study provided a similar amount of speech perception benefit, when compared with group-level performance with conventional hearing aid technology. Individual-level results are presented with discussion around patterns of results that differ from the group average.

Hemispheric asymmetry in auditory processing of speech envelope modulations in prereading children.

PubMed

Vanvooren, Sophie; Poelmans, Hanne; Hofmann, Michael; Ghesquière, Pol; Wouters, Jan

2014-01-22

The temporal envelope of speech is an important cue contributing to speech intelligibility. Theories about the neural foundations of speech perception postulate that the left and right auditory cortices are functionally specialized in analyzing speech envelope information at different time scales: the right hemisphere is thought to be specialized in processing syllable rate modulations, whereas a bilateral or left hemispheric specialization is assumed for phoneme rate modulations. Recently, it has been found that this functional hemispheric asymmetry is different in individuals with language-related disorders such as dyslexia. Most studies were, however, performed in adults and school-aged children, and only a little is known about how neural auditory processing at these specific rates manifests and develops in very young children before reading acquisition. Yet, studying hemispheric specialization for processing syllable and phoneme rate modulations in preliterate children may reveal early neural markers for dyslexia. In the present study, human cortical evoked potentials to syllable and phoneme rate modulations were measured in 5-year-old children at high and low hereditary risk for dyslexia. The results demonstrate a right hemispheric preference for processing syllable rate modulations and a symmetric pattern for phoneme rate modulations, regardless of hereditary risk for dyslexia. These results suggest that, while hemispheric specialization for processing syllable rate modulations seems to be mature in prereading children, hemispheric specialization for phoneme rate modulation processing may still be developing. These findings could have important implications for the development of phonological and reading skills.

A real-time phoneme counting algorithm and application for speech rate monitoring.

PubMed

Aharonson, Vered; Aharonson, Eran; Raichlin-Levi, Katia; Sotzianu, Aviv; Amir, Ofer; Ovadia-Blechman, Zehava

2017-03-01

Adults who stutter can learn to control and improve their speech fluency by modifying their speaking rate. Existing speech therapy technologies can assist this practice by monitoring speaking rate and providing feedback to the patient, but cannot provide an accurate, quantitative measurement of speaking rate. Moreover, most technologies are too complex and costly to be used for home practice. We developed an algorithm and a smartphone application that monitor a patient's speaking rate in real time and provide user-friendly feedback to both patient and therapist. Our speaking rate computation is performed by a phoneme counting algorithm which implements spectral transition measure extraction to estimate phoneme boundaries. The algorithm is implemented in real time in a mobile application that presents its results in a user-friendly interface. The application incorporates two modes: one provides the patient with visual feedback of his/her speech rate for self-practice and another provides the speech therapist with recordings, speech rate analysis and tools to manage the patient's practice. The algorithm's phoneme counting accuracy was validated on ten healthy subjects who read a paragraph at slow, normal and fast paces, and was compared to manual counting of speech experts. Test-retest and intra-counter reliability were assessed. Preliminary results indicate differences of -4% to 11% between automatic and human phoneme counting. Differences were largest for slow speech. The application can thus provide reliable, user-friendly, real-time feedback for speaking rate control practice. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Whole Language in the Play Store.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fields, Marjorie V.; Hillstead, Deborah V.

1990-01-01

The concept of whole language instruction is explained by means of examples from a kindergarten unit on the grocery store. Activities include visiting the supermarket, making stone soup, and creating a grocery store. Activities teach reading, writing, oral language, phonics, and word recognition. (DG)

Assessing the Future.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berger, Allen

A review of the past, the present, and the future offers an enlightening view of literacy in America. A 1967 issue of the "Illinois Journal of Education" has articles on phonics, linguistics, spelling, modalities of learning, disadvantaged children, vision screening and vision training, readiness, Montessori, partnerships between…

The Pictogram System: A Progress Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wendon, Lyn

1979-01-01

Describes a pictogram system in which letters are made to look like human and animal characters as a way of teaching phonics to children; tells how teachers have imaginatively implemented the system through activities in such areas as drama, singing, and story telling. (GT)

Leading with the Heart.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Linik, Joyce Riha

1998-01-01

Describes techniques used in a multi-age class at Coupeville Elementary School, Washington, to boost reading comprehension and inspire students' love of books: access to an abundance of books, challenges to students, skills reinforcement, combined phonics and whole-language instruction, running-record assessment, paired reading, independent…

The Effectiveness of Aripiprazole for Tics, Social Adjustment, and Parental Stress in Children and Adolescents with Tourette's Disorder.

PubMed

Wang, Liang-Jen; Chou, Wen-Jiun; Chou, Miao-Chun; Gau, Susan Shur-Fen

2016-06-01

Tourette's syndrome (TS) frequently results in a negative impact on multiple functional domains. This prospective open-label study investigated the potential effectiveness of aripiprazole for tics, social adjustment, and parental stress in children and adolescents with TS. Study participants consisted of 26 patients (mean age 10.4 ± 3.0 years; 22 boys and 4 girls) who were prescribed aripiprazole, with each dose ranging from 2.5 to 15 mg/day. At baseline and 2, 4, and 8 weeks from baseline, tic symptoms, social adjustment, and parenting stress were assessed using the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS), the Social Adjustment Inventory for Children and Adolescents (SAICA), and the Parenting Stress Index (PSI). Aripiprazole could be optionally titrated from 2.5 to 30 mg/day at each visit. Of the 26 patients at the initial visit, 22 (84.6%) completed the study. The mean dose of aripiprazole at the endpoint was 8.0 ± 4.0 mg/day. During the 8-week aripiprazole treatment period, motor tics, phonic tics, and impairment on the YGTSS all showed significant improvement. Home behaviors on the SAICA and child domain on the PSI also showed significant improvement. Patients' phonic tics, but not motor tics, showed a positive correlation with their school function and peer relationships. The child domain on the PSI was positively correlated with motor tics, phonic tics, and impairment, as measured by the YGTSS. An 8-week aripiprazole treatment program for children and adolescents with TS was beneficial to their tic symptoms, behaviors at home, and caregivers' stress with regard to fulfilling parenting roles. A long-term placebo-controlled trial with larger samples is warranted to confirm the effectiveness of aripiprazole for social adjustment and parental stress.

Three DIBELS Tasks vs. Three Informal Reading/Spelling Tasks: A Comparison of Predictive Validity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morris, Darrell; Trathen, Woodrow; Perney, Jan; Gill, Tom; Schlagal, Robert; Ward, Devery; Frye, Elizabeth M.

2017-01-01

Within a developmental framework, this study compared the predictive validity of three DIBELS tasks (phoneme segmentation fluency [PSF], nonsense word fluency [NWF], and oral reading fluency [ORF]) with that of three alternative tasks drawn from the field of reading (phonemic spelling [phSPEL], word recognition-timed [WR-t], and graded passage…

Musical Structure Modulates Semantic Priming in Vocal Music

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poulin-Charronnat, Benedicte; Bigand, Emmanuel; Madurell, Francois; Peereman, Ronald

2005-01-01

It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A., & Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. "Cognition," 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further…

Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence for the Impact of Regional Variation on Phoneme Perception

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brunelliere, Angele; Dufour, Sophie; Nguyen, Noel; Frauenfelder, Ulrich Hans

2009-01-01

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the impact of phonological variation resulting from a vowel merger on phoneme perception. The perception of the /e/-/[epsilon]/ contrast which does not exist in Southern French-speaking regions, and which is in the process of merging in Northern French-speaking regions, was compared to the…

The Perception of Second Language Sounds in Early Bilinguals: New Evidence from an Implicit Measure

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Navarra, Jordi; Sebastian-Galles, Nuria; Soto-Faraco, Salvador

2005-01-01

Previous studies have suggested that nonnative (L2) linguistic sounds are accommodated to native language (L1) phonemic categories. However, this conclusion may be compromised by the use of explicit discrimination tests. The present study provides an implicit measure of L2 phoneme discrimination in early bilinguals (Catalan and Spanish).…

The Role of Hypercorrection in the Acquisition of L2 Phonemic Contrasts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eckman, Fred R.; Iverson, Gregory K.; Song, Jae Yung

2013-01-01

This article reports empirical findings from an ongoing investigation into the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonemic contrasts. Specifically, we consider the status and role of the phenomenon of hypercorrection in the various stages through which L2 learners develop and internalize a target language (TL) contrast. We adopt the prevailing…

Lindamood Phonemic Sequencing (LiPS) [R]. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2008

2008-01-01

The Lindamood Phonemic Sequencing (LiPS)[R] program (formerly called the Auditory Discrimination in Depth[R] [ADD] program) is designed to teach students skills to decode words and to identify individual sounds and blends in words. The program is individualized to meet student needs and is often used with students who have learning disabilities or…

Fluency Training in Phoneme Blending: A Preliminary Study of Generalized Effects

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martens, Brian K.; Werder, Candace S.; Hier, Bridget O.; Koenig, Elizabeth A.

2013-01-01

We examined the generalized effects of training children to fluently blend phonemes of words containing target vowel teams on their reading of trained and untrained words in lists and passages. Three second-grade students participated. A subset of words containing each of 3 target vowel teams ("aw," "oi," and "au") was trained in lists, and…

Phoneme Segmenting Alignment with the Common Core Foundational Skills Standard Two: Grades K-1. Technical Report #1227

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sáez, Leilani; Irvin, P. Shawn; Alonzo, Julie; Tindal, Gerald

2012-01-01

In 2006, the easyCBM reading assessment system was developed to support the progress monitoring of phoneme segmenting, letter names and sounds recognition, word reading, passage reading fluency, and comprehension skill development in elementary schools. More recently, the Common Core Standards in English Language Arts have been introduced as a…

First Language Grapheme-Phoneme Transparency Effects in Adult Second Language Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ijalba, Elizabeth; Obler, Loraine K.

2015-01-01

The Spanish writing system has consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPC), rendering it more transparent than English. We compared first-language (L1) orthographic transparency on how monolingual English- and Spanish-readers learned a novel writing system with a 1:1 (LT) and a 1:2 (LO) GPC. Our dependent variables were learning time,…

Interaction between Phonemic Abilities and Syllable Congruency Effect in Young Readers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chetail, Fabienne; Mathey, Stephanie

2013-01-01

This study investigated whether and to what extent phonemic abilities of young readers (Grade 5) influence syllabic effects in reading. More precisely, the syllable congruency effect was tested in the lexical decision task combined with masked priming in eleven-year-old children. Target words were preceded by a pseudo-word prime sharing the first…

Poor Phonemic Discrimination Does Not Underlie Poor Verbal Short-Term Memory in Down Syndrome

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Purser, Harry R. M.; Jarrold, Christopher

2013-01-01

Individuals with Down syndrome tend to have a marked impairment of verbal short-term memory. The chief aim of this study was to investigate whether phonemic discrimination contributes to this deficit. The secondary aim was to investigate whether phonological representations are degraded in verbal short-term memory in people with Down syndrome…

Semantic and Phonemic Verbal Fluency in Blinds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nejati, Vahid; Asadi, Anoosh

2010-01-01

A person who has suffered the total loss of a sensory system has, indirectly, suffered a brain lesion. Semantic and phonologic verbal fluency are used for evaluation of executive function and language. The aim of this study is evaluation and comparison of phonemic and semantic verbal fluency in acquired blinds. We compare 137 blinds and 124…

Large-Corpus Phoneme and Word Recognition and the Generality of Lexical Context in CVC Word Perception

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gelfand, Jessica T.; Christie, Robert E.; Gelfand, Stanley A.

2014-01-01

Purpose: Speech recognition may be analyzed in terms of recognition probabilities for perceptual wholes (e.g., words) and parts (e.g., phonemes), where j or the j-factor reveals the number of independent perceptual units required for recognition of the whole (Boothroyd, 1968b; Boothroyd & Nittrouer, 1988; Nittrouer & Boothroyd, 1990). For…

Do Phonological Constraints on the Spoken Word Affect Visual Lexical Decision?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Yang; Moreno, Miguel A.; Carello, Claudia; Turvey, M. T.

2013-01-01

Reading a word may involve the spoken language in two ways: in the conversion of letters to phonemes according to the conventions of the language's writing system and the assimilation of phonemes according to the language's constraints on speaking. If so, then words that require assimilation when uttered would require a change in the phonemes…

Hemispheric Specialization for Language According to Grapho-Phonemic Transformation and Gender. A Divided Visual Field Experiment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cousin, Emilie; Perrone, Marcela; Baciu, Monica

2009-01-01

This behavioral study aimed at assessing the effect of two variables on the degree of hemispheric specialization for language. One of them was the "grapho-phonemic translation (transformation)" (letter-sound mapping) and the other was the participants' "gender". The experiment was conducted with healthy volunteers. A divided visual field procedure…

Teaching Adults to Read Braille Using Phonological Methods: Single-Case Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crawford, Shauna; Elliott, Robert T.

2009-01-01

Four women with visual impairments were taught 13 braille letters as phonemes and another 13 braille letters as graphemes and then were taught 10 braille words as onset-rime and another 10 braille words as whole words. Phoneme and onset-rime instruction resulted in faster and more accurate performance. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Introduction and Overview of the Vicens-Reddy Speech Recognition System.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kameny, Iris; Ritea, H.

The Vicens-Reddy System is unique in the sense that it approaches the problem of speech recognition as a whole, rather than treating particular aspects of the problems as in previous attempts. For example, where earlier systems treated only segmentation of speech into phoneme groups, or detected phonemes in a given context, the Vicens-Reddy System…

Phonological Competition within the Word: Evidence from the Phoneme Similarity Effect in Spoken Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohen-Goldberg, Ariel M.

2012-01-01

Theories of spoken production have not specifically addressed whether the phonemes of a word compete with each other for selection during phonological encoding (e.g., whether /t/ competes with /k/ in cat). Spoken production theories were evaluated and found to fall into three classes, theories positing (1) no competition, (2) competition among…

Learning of a Formation Principle for the Secondary Phonemic Function of a Syllabic Orthography

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fletcher-Flinn, Claire M.; Thompson, G. Brian; Yamada, Megumi; Meissel, Kane

2014-01-01

It has been observed in Japanese children learning to read that there is an early and rapid shift from exclusive reading of hiragana as syllabograms to the dual-use convention in which some hiragana also represent phonemic elements. Such rapid initial learning appears contrary to the standard theories of reading acquisition that require…

Investigating the Phonological Similarity Effect: Syllable Structure and the Position of Common Phonemes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nimmo, Lisa M.; Roodenrys, Steven

2004-01-01

The aim of the present research was to determine whether the effect that phonological similarity has on immediate serial recall is influenced by the consistency and position of phonemes within words. In comparison to phonologically dissimilar lists, when the stimulus lists rhyme there is a facilitative effect on the recall of item information and…

Do Adults with Cochlear Implants Rely on Different Acoustic Cues for Phoneme Perception than Adults with Normal Hearing?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moberly, Aaron C.; Lowenstein, Joanna H.; Tarr, Eric; Caldwell-Tarr, Amanda; Welling, D. Bradley; Shahin, Antoine J.; Nittrouer, Susan

2014-01-01

Purpose: Several acoustic cues specify any single phonemic contrast. Nonetheless, adult, native speakers of a language share weighting strategies, showing preferential attention to some properties over others. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing disrupts the salience of some cues: In general, amplitude structure remains readily available, but…

Assessing the Double Phonemic Representation in Bilingual Speakers of Spanish and English: An Electrophysiological Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Garcia-Sierra, Adrian; Ramirez-Esparza, Nairan; Silva-Pereyra, Juan; Siard, Jennifer; Champlin, Craig A.

2012-01-01

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the "phonemic in English"…

Deficit in phonological processes: a characteristic of the neuropsychological profile of children with NF1.

PubMed

Chaix, Yves; Lauwers-Cancès, Valérie; Faure-Marie, Nathalie; Gentil, Catherine; Lelong, Sandrine; Schweitzer, Elisabeth; Rodriguez, Diana; Iannuzzi, Stéphanie; Kemlin, Isabelle; Dorison, Nathalie; Rivier, François; Carniero, Maryline; Preclaire, Elodie; Barbarot, Sébastien; Lion-François, Laurence; Castelnau, Pierre

2018-05-01

Learning disabilities are one of the most frequent complications of neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) in children. Studies of the effects of the neurocognitive deficit on academic performance are relatively rare, owing to the small size of the populations concerned. However, research is needed to develop effective rehabilitation programs. In the present study, we explored the impact of a possible phonological deficit on the reading abilities of children with NF1. A multicenter, cross-sectional study was conducted in France on two groups of 75 children with or without NF1 aged 8-12 years, matched for age, sex, handedness, and reading level. All participants underwent a neuropsychological evaluation to assess their general cognitive level, reading skills, phonological processes, visuoperceptual abilities, and attentional capacity. Phonological skills were assessed by means of two phonological awareness tasks and one short-term memory task. In the group of children with NF1, 41% had reading difficulties. Phonological processes were impaired in this group, compared with the children without NF1. Similar differences were found for a phoneme deletion task after adjustment for reading difficulties, IQ level, and visuoperceptual abilities. Phonological awareness, but not phonological short-term memory, was impaired in children with NF1, and not just those whose reading was impaired. Results suggest that children with NF1 have a phonological awareness deficit, whatever their reading level. Identification of reduced phonological skills may warrant the implementation of a specific rehabilitation program before early reading difficulties emerge.